INTERVIEW – Joey Vera, Motor Sister/Armored Saint – April 2015

INTERVIEW – Joey Vera, Motor Sister/Armored Saint – April 2015
By Shane Pinnegar

It started out innocently enough: Scott Ian, face-mulletted guitar-slinger for Anthrax these past 34 years, wanted his favourite band, Mother Superior, to play at his 50th birthday party. Long disbanded, the next best plan was to invite singer Jim Wilson to revisit Ian’s favourite tracks from his old outfit, and assemble some friends who could do the tunes justice.

One thing rapidly led to another, and lo and behold, Motor Sister was born and has released one of the albums of 2015 in Ride, a collection of Mother Superior songs reinvented by the all-star cast of Ian, Wilson, Armored Saint’s Joey Vera laying down the bass, drummer John Tempesta (Exodus/Testament/Rob Zombie/the Cult), and Ian’s wife (who is, incidentally, Meatloaf’s daughter) Pearl Aday contributing backing vocals.

Joey Vera, who also played live with Anthrax in the mid ‘00s for about a year, has just returned from collecting his kids from school when 100% ROCK calls in, and amid the barking dogs and excited children, he explains how Ian first pitched the band to him.

“It’s bizarre in a way. We didn’t anticipate doing any of this stuff [recording, much less interviews & promotion]. It’s just strange. The life it’s taken on is totally unexpected – it’s cool though! We know what this is, we have respect for it. We’re just embracing it right now.

“[Scott Ian] was having a birthday party,” recalls Vera, “and that was already done and set in stone, and I was going to the party anyway. He called me up shortly before the party and said, ‘hey, I want to do this thing – I want to jam Mother Superior songs.’ To me it wasn’t that out of the blue or strange – we were all Mother Superior fans to begin with, and Jim Wilson is a friend of ours so we see him all the time. We hang out and we do other things with him, like he’s involved in Pearl’s solo project, and we’ve done songwriting with him in other scenarios.

“So it wasn’t totally out of the blue, left field. Of course, when he said that to me, I said, ‘oh that’s a great idea, that sounds like a lot of fun. I’m in. I’m going there anyway, I’ll just bring my bass.’ He gave me a list of the songs, and then it started getting exciting because it was like, ‘wow, this is going to be a lot of fun.’ We learned twelve tunes. It was going to be a blast – we all knew it. That’s how it got started.”

From playing a small party to doing interviews across the other side of the planet seems like a huge leap, but Vera says it was a very organic process – it just happened, without being forced or pressured in any way.

“That’s pretty accurate. We did the party, and it was very small – there was only twenty people there maybe, and the vibe was really cool. We did the thing and it was awesome. A couple days after the fact, that’s when this idea was brought up. It was just through a

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“That’s why we decided if we do this,” he continues excitedly, “it has to be done with the same passion that the party was done in. We did the exact same twelve songs. We made sure that we had to play everything live. One take. No fixing, overdubbing, cutting and pasting: none of that crap. We even invited friends to the studio. At the studio we had probably ten people, or fifteen people, literally in the room with us with a cooler of beer. There’s people just hanging around watching us record. That was fun to begin with, and we said, ‘well if we’re going to make a record, this is how we’re going to make this record.’

“We’ve been doing interviews and people sometimes get a little misconstrued and think, from the outside, that it looks like this was kind of put together – an all-star band, you know what I mean? That’s not at all what this was. We’re all just friends, and we all know each other, and we all hang out together. It just so happens that it transitioned into a record. It’s why we wanted to do it live, and keep it raw, keep it rough. It’s not perfect, it’s not one of those records, but it’s honest.”

Given the relaxed – and fast [the album was recorded in two days] – nature of the recording, and the immense groove of the finished product, it begs the question: Why aren’t more albums made this way?

“Well, I don’t know,” says Vera, “that’s a good question, to be honest with you, I don’t know why they aren’t. They should be though. I think that people maybe nowadays, musicians – myself included – I don’t make records like this enough and I wish I would make more of them this way. I think that people, musicians and people involved in bands and producers, they get really hung up on feeling like they’re going to be scrutinized by the public and the press. So because of this fear of scrutiny, they want to make sure that everything is ‘perfect’. They don’t want to have any blemishes showing.

“I guess this sort of fake standard, if you want to call it that, has been going on for quite some time now with the advent of computer recording and stuff. The ability to make things perfect is at your fingertips and people have been using that, so now everybody is used to hearing things a certain way. It’s a shame really because by doing that you really can suck out the life and soul out of music, and that’s really defeating the whole purpose of making music in the first place. I’m not sure why more people don’t do it this way. I mean there are some exceptions I’m sure, to the rule. I’m sure there are a lot of new groups that are doing that these days. It’s insane, people should do it more.”

You can’t beat a band playing live in the studio, and with decades of experience under their belts, Motor Sister’s members have the chops to nail it.

“A lot of the compliments should be going to Jay Ruston, who produced it and mixed it,” lauds Vera. “He engineered it as well. He was the guy sort of directing us. He got the sound first of all, and he also directed us. I don’t think we played a song more than three times, and then that was it. As soon as the vibe was there, done, let’s move on to the next one. We did six songs the first day, and six songs the second day.”

In the current musical climate we see more and more so-called ‘supergroups’ forming, often constructed by management or record label deals, often not even meeting to record, just emailing files back and forth. It’s the antithesis of what Motor Sister is all about, but realistically, Vera accepts they may be tarred with a similar brush despite the reality of their situation.

“It’s difficult. I can’t really control people’s perceptions. None of us really can, other than us being vocal about it. If you read the story, and you understand the story about this and how it really did come to fruition, you might be a little less likely to immediately dub it a ‘supergroup’. It’s funny, it’s kind of more like a tribute band!

“We’re more of that than we are a super group,” he chuckles. “I don’t know, there’s been some talk about us maybe doing some writing together. We talked about what we’re going to do in the future. We have such a good time being together and playing together that we wanted to say, ‘well let’s just see what happens.’ We’re not making this a career opportunity for everybody. Scott’s still in Anthrax, I’m still doing Armored Saint and Fates Warning, and other things. Pearl has her solo career. Jim has his solo career and he still plays with Daniel Lanois. Everybody is busy.

“We’re going to see what happens. Who knows, I mean in the future we may make another record and maybe it’ll be all-original material. I don’t know, maybe at that point we might be able to say, ‘okay, that’s a supergroup,’ but for now we’re not trying to do that.”

Talking of other projects, heavy metal stalwarts Armored Saint have a new album coming out at the start of June, to be called Win Hands Down.

“Well, we’re super excited about it,” Vera exclaims. “We just wrapped it up a video for the title track Win Hands Down, [the album] comes out June second on Metal Blade, and we’re super excited about it. John [Bush, singer] and I wrote the majority of the material over the past year and half, I guess, and it’s great. We’re super stoked about it. It’s got some familiar grooves and things that will be familiar to old school Armored Saint fans. It’s also got some boundary pushing in other areas. It really has elevated the group, at least in my opinion. It sounds really big and epic and Jay Ruston – speaking of Mother Superior – he actually mixed the Armored Saint record as well. It just sounds epic and huge. We’re stoked.”

Armored Saint 2015

Between Armored Saint, Fates Warning, Motor Sister, playing on Pearl’s forthcoming second solo album, engineering and production work, when does Vera find time for fun and family?

“Sometimes it’s a problem,” he laughs. “I’m fortunate, when I’m not touring and busy in the studio I’m a stay-at-home dad, so I’m lucky in that sense. Whenever I’m not out away from home, I am home, and I’m home all the time, so, I try to be present when I’m here. I’ve got a home studio here and I also sometimes work as a mixer engineer, producer, so I have that opportunity as well that even if I’m off the road or I’m working, I’m still working from home. I try to spend time with the family as much as I can. Like I said, I’m mostly a stay-at-home-dad when I’m home, so I have that luxury of just being here whenever I am here.”

Category: Interviews