IMPELLITTER! GESUNDHEIT...

IMPELLITTER! GESUNDHEIT...

FEATURES

Paul Suter

Ludicrous speed. Mel Brooks hit on it in Spaceballs without ever realizing that he had summed up a whole generation of heavy metal. Songs, melody, stuff like that—can a band really function successfully at. . . ludicrous speed? Or, more to the point here, can a guitarist really say anything more than “look at me” whilst frantically diddling away?

As perhaps befits the guitarist with the most letters in his name, Chris Impellitteri is setting his sights on being the guitarist with the most notes in his solos, even declaring on the inner sleeve of his first full album “I promise that my guitar solos will only get faster.” The theme must be having its effect, for at the time of writing the album has sold over 75,000 units in its first three weeks and zipped up to #116 on the Billboard charts—no mean achievement for a virtual unknown with only a limited-edition independent EP to his prior credit.

The line-up of his band has surely contributed a great deal to Impellitteri’s initial acceptance, but the ultimate fate of the project will rest squarely on Chris' shoulders. Still, there’s been plenty of interest stirred up by the involvement of vocalist Graham Bonnet, who's previously sung alongside such guitar greats as Michael Schenker and Ritchie Blackmore, as well as unleashing Steve Vai and the dreaded/revered (delete according to taste) Yngwie Malmsteen onto the world via Alcatrazz. Discerning record buyers aren't about to sniff at ex-Quiet Riot bassist Chuck Wright either, or Wright’s post-album replacement Dave Spitz, formerly of White Lion and Black Sabbath (and the brother of Anthrax’s Dan Spitz). Then there’s former Driver keyboardist Phillip Wolfe. Only drummers Pat Torpey (actually a noted sessioneer and now recruited to the Billy Sheehan/ Paul Gilbert/Eric Martin project) and replacement Stet Howland can claim complete innocence over the sudden prominence of the band—a prominence which has to be lived up to, and it's Chris Impeilitteri who has to bear the ultimate burden of that responsibility,

Chris and the boys have more than succeeded in justifying themselves on their LP, with Chris’ guitar solos balancing their speed with a fluid coherence. The songs are actually neat enough to stand on their own too, with sheer musicianship making even the lesser achievements in the writing department worth listening to. So given the fact that we're dealing with a band that's here today and won’t be gone tomorrow, it’s time to find out a few details . . .

Chris is originally from Connecticut, where he and Rob Rock (more recently featured alongside Aldridge and Sarzo in Driver) had a hard-working club band which Chris now—with a wicked grin of secrecy—refuses to name. Indeed, the guitarist is extremely non-specific about anything prior to the current project, and even draws a veil over his self-financed debut EP. Fact is that it was a damn good record, and won particularly strong reactions in Europe, where the media recognized another guitar star in the making.

Chris himself wasn’t happy with the project though, and after a show at The Roxy in L.A. (which he freely admits was awful), he decided to part company with Rob Rock—with whom he’d temporarily reunited after Driver split up—and put together a team of hand-picked players with which to make the statement he had in mind. He may play fast, but his career moves are slow, steady and carefully planned.

“Alcatrazz was over,” Graham takes up the story, “and Chris called me to do a session, that’s all it was to start with. But it turned into writing tunes together, we got on well, and one thing led to another.”

So how does Bonnet feel about hitching his wagon to yet another rising guitar star? After all, having put up with foibles of men such as Blackmore, Schenker, Malmsteen and Vai, you’d think that Bonnet might just have felt that enough was enough. Seemingly not. . .

“It was great to get back to my roots, so to speak, because Alcatrazz had really drifted. Capitol had made the band go really commercial and it was just horrible. We were even reduced to doing covers. Now it’s great to be doing rock ’n’ roll again, and to be writing the songs instead of doing other people’s.

“At the time I just didn’t know what the hell to do, so when Chris played his stuff to me, that was what I wanted to do! We played each other our stuff, then it progressed to him putting things down on the portastudio and me writing words in the kitchen at home and then driving all the way to Thousand Oaks with them, it was hard work at the time, but worthwhile in the end.

“I even went back to Australia for six months to think things out. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know for sure if this was going to end up as a real band or not, but then Chris called and told me exactly what was happening, and I came back. I had a good time there though, did some pub gigs with a couple of old friends, made some money too. Two thousand in cash in your hand at the end of the night, thank you very much! Nobody has management there, no agencies, no commissions to pay because the bands manage themselves and book themselves and get paid cash in hand. It’s great but it’s too far away from the rest of the world—if they’d move Australia a bit closer to America I could commute a bit easier. Shame I can’t tow the bastard back here.”

But to return to the point, what about the prospect of another one of those precious guitar heroes at your elbow, Mr. Bonnet?

“Chris is louder! He’s different, he’s got a style of his own, but he’s real musical. He has the same ideas as me about the way tunes should go, and he’s a great player. Just listen to the guy play and it’s someone you’d want to work with, he’s just so talented.

“He’s a baby and I'm his dad, although sometimes it seems to work the other way around. He’s actually older than me in some ways—it’s like ‘Graham, c’mon! Graham what are you doing?' And if I, or anyone else in the band, does something silly, he’ll correct us. Not bad for a young man!”

Not bad for a young man to be able to recruit such a band of notables, much less to earn their respect. After all, when this band was in its recruitment stages, Relativity—the company to which Chris is signed—was still a pre-Satriani noreputation label, and Impellitteri himself was a no-reputation speed merchant who was unnervingly self-assured. So often the concept is to recruit young, hungry musicians and go for broke, but Impellitteri believed that it was crucial to surround himself with experience and maturity instead.

“There were a lot of people out there who really weren’t seasoned,” he explains. “They had all the right elements but hadn’t learned how to put them together, so I had to find players who were musically mature.

“Graham’s influences are great for my stuff, they complement my own. I’m into stuff like Al DiMeola, Allan Holdsworth and classical music, whilst Graham’s into the Beatles, the Beach Boys and stuff like that, which is actually the vocal equivalent of the same thing. With the combination of our influences, when you hear us you’re not just going to hear the same three chords, you’ll hear something—hopefully—which Bach might have written for a hard rock band if he were around today.”

But wasn’t there just the tiniest tendency to get overawed, working with players with such exemplary track records? “Not really, I didn't feel threatened at all. There were times when I’d feel a little bit weird telling them what to do, but I knew that what I do was maybe more advanced than the stuff they had been doing, so they had to adapt and push themselves musically.”

True enough, Impellitteri has been knocking on a few doors which not too many guitar players have chosen to even approach, simply by keeping the HM field as his main context. While he may cite the likes of DiMeola and Holdsworth, the songs remain metal whilst many of his contemporaries have chosen to exercise their talents in more reflecting settings. So what about your contemporaries, Chris?

“Well, Ritchie Blackmore’s been a big influence. He happened to get commercial acceptance, but his ideas are still great, and I’ll be the first to admit that I got a lot of my stuff from him. When you’re 13 and 14 you’re not going to listen to DiMeola and stuff like that because you want to hear rock, and so Blackmore was who I listened to. And Gary Moore too. Then you start to read articles with them talking about Bach, and it’s ‘Hey, I better listen to that stuff too.’

“I’m perfectly happy about the modern players I’m being put in amongst. I think I’m in good company. I play fast, but I didn’t listen to these guys to get that, I was already doing it. I’m trying to play classically-influenced music that’s acceptable to a 13-year-old, and I guess that’s my niche amongst the other players.”

“The difference with Chris,” interjects Dave Spitz, “is that he plays for the songs, whereas a lot of the other guys aren’t contributing to a song at all. And he picks every single note too!”

“To be honest,” avers Chris, “I don’t listen to other players enough to really hear the differences. I do know Tony MacAlpine’s a great player, lyrical and very fluid, and Yngwie has speed and he made the classical format more acceptable. And of course it was Graham who helped to bring him out.”

For all of Impellitteri’s earnest musical intensity, there’s also an astonishingly high level of goofing off going on whenever the band plays together, which promises to make the band’s show distinctly more enjoyable than school music lessons. When was the last time you laughed at a guitar hero show?

Graham Bonnet’s prepared to smile at all the pomp and circumstance, and he’ll put a smile on audiences’ faces with his antics, spurred on by drummer Howland, who really ought to be doing comedy stand-up routines, judging by the performance the band put on to deflate one potentially pompous occasion. They have fun, it spreads to the rest of the band and from there out into the audience, and that makes for an enjoyable show. Add pure entertainment to the musical appreciation, and you’ve get a band destined to make their mark.