The Melvins Life: King Buzzo on Soundtracks, Sonic Relevance & Still Giving a Shit

Left to right: Dale Crover, Steven McDonald and Buzz Osborne/King Buzzo of The Melvins (Photo courtesy of Speakeasy PR)

If you’re new to The Melvins, imagine Captain Beefheart fronting Flipper doing a set of Sabbath covers. If that thought gets you going, read on.

Formed in 1983, The Melvins have built an incredibly prolific discography that boasts some of the most wildly inventive – and undeniably heavy – sounds committed to record. The band’s newest release (and the latest chapter in their long association with Faith No More/Dead Cross/ Fantômas frontman Mike Patton’s Ipecac Recordings), A Walk With Love And Death, finds the trio stepping into double-album territory for the very first time. A Walk… showcases two distinct sides to the band’s music: Death, a proper Melvins release, and Love, the score to the Jesse Nieminen-directed, Melvins-produced short also titled A Walk With Love And Death. (A release date for the short has not been announced yet, but the trailer can be seen below.) Guests on the album include Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago, That Dog’s Anna Waronker and Teri Gender Bender of Le Butcherettes/Crystal Fairy, with the whole package co-produced by veteran Melvins associate Toshi Kosai.

A Walk With Love And Death is another achievement for a band that has never once stopped exploring the esoteric. Fronted by the incomparable Buzz Osborne (a.k.a. King Buzzo, also of Fantômas) and boasting the blistering beat of longtime drummer Dale Crover (whose career also includes a memorable stint with Nirvana, resulting most significantly in him playing on a handful of tracks on 1989’s Bleach), The Melvins’ fluctuating bass player spot has included such notables as Lori “Lorax” Black (daughter of screen legend Shirley Temple Black), Matt Lukin (later of Mudhoney), Jeff Pinkus (Butthole Surfers), Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle/ Fantômas) and Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic. (The Melvins’ history with Nirvana runs even deeper, as Crover and Osborne both played in Kurt Cobain’s mid-’80s band, Fecal Matter.) Steven McDonald, best known for his work with OFF! and California Pop/Punk legends Redd Kross, has held the bass position since last year. (Also of note is Crover’s recently released solo album on Joyful Noise Recordings, The Fickle Finger Of Fate, which is absolutely worth seeking out.)

To learn more about A Walk With Love And Death and The Melvins circa 2017, I hit Buzz up on his cell last Saturday shortly after his soundtrack for that's evening's performance in St. Louis. 

I’m glad that our paths are crossing right now, because I really love this new release. Obviously, this is a different kind of Melvins album. How did this relationship with Jesse begin, and how does this particular film project work into the album itself?

We’ve known Jesse since the early ’90s. We met him when he was going to college in Athens, Georgia, and we’ve been friends with him ever since. He’s very involved in modular synth music, and he helped me build my own modular synth, which was great. We’ve know him more than two decades.

What was it about his movie that you thought would be good to meld The Melvins into?

Well, me and him are doing it together. He’s the main creative driving force, but I’m adding a lot. We’ll see; it’ll be very experimental. We like all kinds of weird stuff. It’s sort of like The Holy Mountain crossed with Twin Peaks.

Was the Death part of this collection already in the can before this thing came about?

No, we recorded all of it at the same time. We’d be working on some of one and some of the other. It was all done at the exact same time, so it really is a real thing. We could have just made it all into one album and just picked combinations of stuff off one and the other one. But we thought we had enough material to do two albums, so we might as well. I think it works really good because they’re so different. I figured if people can’t handle it, then the should grow a pair!

You have a lot of guests on this record – like Joey, Anna and Teri Gender Bender. What did they bring to the proceedings that wouldn’t have been there otherwise?

They contributed to things that already existed, so we really didn’t write music with them; they just came in. Joey was there for maybe an hour or an hour and a half. We just played him songs, and he just jammed over them. That’s it; it wasn’t like a massive collaboration. Anna came down one day and was also there for maybe an hour and a half and did some vocals on stuff. It was really, really, really simple.

What kind of input did Toshi have on this? Obviously, you’re a band that’s been doing it long enough to know your own sound. What does having that outside fourth perspective achieve when you’re in the studio working on a project like this?

We’ve worked with lots of different people. We’ve worked with Toshi for a long time – 15 or 16 years, probably. He’s great; I think he’s a highly underrated engineer. He’s very, very into trying new and different things. We have a studio space with him in LA that we’ve had for quite a few years now. He does some other bands there, but it’s not really a commercial studio. We do a lot of stuff there at our leisure. That’s how it works [now]; it’s a new industry. The days of going into a studio for four to six weeks are over. We never really did that anyway. It’s just dumb to do that, I think. Times have changed. I think our stuff sonically stands up to anything that’s out there. Anything. If people want to disagree with that, well, some people like peanut butter and some don’t. I know what I like. These records I have no problem with at all; I wouldn’t change a thing on any of them. If I don’t like something when I put a record out, I’ll just make a new record. It’s not tremendously difficult to do things of that nature; it’s also not vastly world-stoppingly important. It’s music; it’s what we do. It’s not like, ‘Oh my God. I’ve got to work on this record. I have to write music for two years!’ It would’t be any different. We work at an incredibly quick pace; I’m very excited about that. I feel very fortunate that that’s how it works, but I work with people who are really good. The guys who I play with are great players, and they make it a lot easier.

I talk with a lot of bands who have been playing since the ’80s. A lot of them have been through the major label – and even indie label – conveyor belt. At this stage in their career, a lot of them are putting out music on their own and being their own record companies. In the case of The Melvins, this new record's out on Ipecac Recordings. What does Ipecac offer The Melvins at this stage of the game that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise?

We trust [Mike Patton], and it works. I’m a creature of habit when it comes to that sort of thing. If you treat me right, I’ll be nice to you as well. Why change things if it’s working? The grass isn’t always greener. We do a lot of things on our own as well, but those are smaller releases that are less in a traditional form, which I’m very excited about as well. But who knows? If we can’t do it with Ipecac, then we’ll do something else. We’ll figure it out. I’m certainly not afraid of anything; I never have been.

You’ve had a lot of different bass players over the years. Is there a particular reason for why that spot has been ever-changing throughout the band’s career?

Most of the bass players have been in the band longer than most bands stick together. We had Mark [Duetrom] and we had Kevin [Rutmanis], and that was from ’93 until 2006. That’s a tremendously long time. It’s not a lot of bass players in that amount of time; it’s longer than most bands last. When we had to get rid of Kevin, we decided that we didn’t want to put all of our hopes and dreams in one thing because it’s too difficult to deal with. I don’t have any interest in having to worry about something that’s not going to work for whatever reason. In every single one of these cases, the reasons we’re not playing with them are totally personal reasons; it has nothing to do with musicianship. There’s no other way to deal with that; I don’t know how else you deal with that in those types of situations. There’s that, plus I want to remain working; in those kind of situations, it’s impossible to work under those conditions. So there you go; that’s the main thing.

It’s not a ‘revolving door.’ I like how all these guys play. When people say that kind of thing, it’s not being fair to bass players’ abilities. We’ve only ever played with people who were really good, other than the first bass player we had. Everybody else was an amazingly good player who could handle it. Not anybody can do it. That’s not fair to those guys to say that. If people think that, then they’re not listening to what’s going on.

Certainly, Steven had a tremendous history prior to coming on board with you guys. How does he best serve where you guys are now musically?

Well, we let him do what he wants. We don’t dictate a whole lot [of] what’s going on; we trust his abilities to do the right thing, and there’s no reason for me not to. We were already fans of what he did. We trust him; we let him do his thing, and we’re better off for doing that. When you hire a painter to paint a picture of your wife, are you going to stand over his shoulder and tell him what to do? No, you trust him, his vision and what he’s doing. I don’t know what people think or how other bands work, but that’s not how I work. That should be clearly obvious if people listen to all the people we’ve played with. They’ve all offered something completely different than the other guys.  

You and Dale have worked together for a long time in a business or industry that isn’t really known for making long-running friendships –

What business is?

Exactly. In terms of the two of you working together, what has enabled you guys to persevere after all these decades?

We trust each other. I write a lot of material, and he trusts my vision. That’s about it. He trusts what I’m doing, and we don’t argue about anything, really. It makes it easy; I can’t think of any reason not to do it. The only reason you would quit doing something like this is because A) People don’t give a shit anymore, or B) You don’t give a shit anymore. There’s really no other reason to quit, unless you have some personal issue, like you’re a heroin addict or who knows what. If you lose interest in it, then why would you do it? If no one cares, then why would you do it?

Obviously, we’re in touch because of the new record, but I know enough about you guys to know that there are other things always happening. What do the next six months look like for The Melvins?

We’re touring until the middle of November. Then, we have another album that’s almost finished; it just needs to be mixed. We recorded it at the beginning of this year. I’m not sure exactly when that will come out, but we’re not ones to wait too long for anything. We’ll see.

We’re looking at 30 years since your first album [Gluey Porch Treatments] came out, and it’s a huge accomplishment for any band to still be here three decades later. That first record still holds up today; I can listen to that and the new record back to back, and it still sounds current. How has making albums evolved for you over the years? Is there a formula that you continue to use – in terms of your outlook and what you want out of music – or do you think that’s changed in the last 30 years you’ve been doing this?

My attitude as far as what I’m doing, why I was doing it and what I thought about it hasn’t changed at all. From the beginning, I’ve had an idea of what I’ve wanted to. We didn’t have a lot of takers, but I was sure of it. I was sure it would work; thankfully, I wasn’t wrong about that. But we make records in a wide variety of ways, so there’s no one way we do anything. We’ve recorded over 400 songs. It’s not something you would just plug into [and say], ‘Here’s how we do this.’ That would be incredibly boring.

To close out with a standard Rock journalist question –

I’ll give you a standard Rock journalist answer!

Obviously, you guys have a wide-ranging discography; there are a lot of things going on there –

Thank you for noticing!

Absolutely! I would be hard-pressed to answer this question if someone asked me it about you, so I figured I’d go to the source. Where should someone begin if they want to get into The Melvins and understand what you represent musically and philosophically?

I would buy the new album; I would also buy Colossus Of Destiny. I would buy – off the top of my head – Bullhead, Stoner Witch and (A) Senile Animal. That would give you a good take on what we’re doing. There’s certainly not one album. But if they have those five album and listen to them intently and still don’t like us, then they just don’t like us. Nothing they can do.

Well, you’re still out there working, so plenty of people clearly do.

Yeah, but if they listen to those five albums and they have no interest, then I don’t know what to tell them. This is what we are; those five records are a pretty good representation of it.

* Portions of the above interview were edited for space and clarity. 

MELVINS TOUR DATES

September 16  Tampa, FL  The Orpheum
September 17  Ft. Lauderdale, FL  The Culture Room
September 18  Orlando, FL The Social
September 20  Athens, GA  40 Watt Club
September 21  Atlanta, GA  The Masquerade (Hell Stage)
September 22  Nashville, TN  3rd & Lindsley
September 23  Memphis, TN  Hi-Tone
September 25  Madison, WI  High Noon Saloon
September 26  Rock Island, IL  Rock Island Brewing Co.
September 27  Des Moines, IA  Wooly’s
September 28  Omaha, NE  The Waiting Room
September 30  Ft. Collins, CO  Aggie Theatre
October 2  Albuquerque, NM  The Launchpad
October 3  Flagstaff, AZ  The Green Room

The Official Melvins Website 

The Melvins @ Ipecac Recordings

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Blizzard of Doubt: The Mysterious Case of the “Over The Mountain” Drum Intro

The music business is a savage world. When all is said and done and the cash and acclaim go away, what is left for most musicians is a sonic footprint of their efforts and – with a bit of luck – credit for everything they did. With this in mind, more than a few eyebrows were raised last month when famed Quiet Riot drummer Frankie Banali told Songfacts writer Greg Prato that he was the one who came up with the explosive drum fill that opens Ozzy Osbourne’s 1981 classic “Over The Mountain:”

Songfacts: Is it true that it was you who came up with the opening drum pattern - later performed by Lee Kerslake, but credited to Tommy Aldridge - on the Ozzy Osborne song, "Over the Mountain"? 

Frankie: Yes. How that came about was really interesting. I had an apartment in West Hollywood - this small, one-bedroom apartment - and I was having to hustle as many gigs as I could and as many sessions as I could just to meet my monthly rent while all my other friends were still couch-surfing. I get a call one morning... from Randy Rhoads. 

Randy had a really low voice. Everybody thinks he had a high voice because he was a tiny little guy, but he had a really low voice. He goes, "Frankie, do you want to play with Ozzy?" And I said, ‘The guy from Black Sabbath?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ I go,’OK! I have my drums, but I don't have a car.’

So he borrowed a car that was big enough. He came and picked me up and we went down to rehearsals. And when I say, ‘Pick me up,’ he picked me up with my 1969 green Ludwig sparkle set with a 26-inch bass drum. I brought a gong - the whole thing. We went to this rehearsal studio called Mars - on Melrose and Western - and we rehearsed for about a week. It was interesting. It was great to play with Randy, and the bass player oddly enough was Dana Strum, who eventually became the bass player in the Vinnie Vincent Invasion and then Slaughter. Essentially, that was the band. 

Ozzy was interesting - he was nothing like what I expected. He was quiet and he sat down on a piano bench with a little ghetto blaster, and he was recording essentially everything we were doing. That ended up becoming ‘Over The Mountain,’ which at that time wasn't really fleshed out. A lot of those parts were guitar parts that Randy brought in from older Quiet Riot songs from the '75-'79 period, and that triplet thing is something that I was doing at every session because I figured, ‘If it ever comes out, I'm finally going to get it on a record,’ because I really enjoyed it. It's derivative of the ‘John Bonham triplet.’ John Bonham is one of my favorite drummers, so that's how that came about.

Now, originally, they were going to record the record in LA, but Jet Records had spent so much money flying Ozzy between London, LA and New York looking for musicians and they were really unsure what Ozzy's future was going to be. Ultimately, they decided to just record it in England, because it would be less expensive, and they would only pay to fly one guy over. And obviously, ‘the guy’ was Randy Rhoads. That was my brush with Ozzy-ness, so to speak.

The interesting thing about that one is, I read - I think it was in Bob Daisley's book [For Facts Sake] - that it's nonsense and that I didn't come up with that drum part, that he was there when Lee Kerslake - who is a friend that I really love, from Uriah Heep - came up with the drum part. It is fascinating that Bob Daisley would say something like this, because this happened a year before he was involved with the band, and he wasn't in Hollywood. So, how could he pass judgement like that? I know what I played. 

Suspecting that there was possibly far more to this story, I recently tracked down Banali, Daisley and Kerslake to dive deeper into their versions of events.

“It’s a bit of a sweeping statement to make such a claim,” offered Daisley from his home in Sydney, Australia. "Unless he’s got something to prove that, like a tape or a recording of the rehearsal with Randy playing that riff and him playing that drum intro, but there's nothing.”

Additionally, Daisley took issue with Banali’s suggestion that the bassist wasn’t involved in the group until a good year after the Osbourne/Rhoads/Banali/Strum rehearsals took place.

“That's not even close to being accurate; I got involved with Ozzy only weeks after the LA sessions, just after he'd come back to England. I met him in London in October, 1979; the LA sessions had been in September. Ozzy and Randy met up in LA when Ozzy had been booted out of Black Sabbath. Don Arden and his daughter, Sharon [now Osbourne], were involved with him. Ozzy was out of his mind most of the time anyway, but he wasn’t trying to put a band together – they were trying to do it for him. Sharon actually phoned me and said, ‘We’re looking for guitarists. Do you know any?’ I was in London; I said, ‘I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. If I hear of anything, I’ll let you know.’ It was Dana Strum who told Ozzy about this guitarist he had seen and knew about called Randy Rhoads. Randy came down, and Ozzy was out of his face; I think it was late at night. Randy played, and Ozzy said, ‘You’ve got the job!’ Ozzy, Randy, Dana and Frankie played for a few days, but Ozzy came back to England after that, and he didn't take Randy with him.

A couple of weeks later, I met Ozzy in a club called the Music Machine in Camden in London. He said to me, ‘I’m putting a band together; would you be interested?’ I had just come out of Rainbow; I said, ‘Sure!’ There’s this rumor that Ozzy took Randy back to England with him after he’d met him in LA. He didn’t; he tried to get a band together in England because Jet Records wanted English players and people living in England. So really when you look at it, Ozzy and I were the first two members, because Jet Records – Don Arden and his son, David – were managing Ozzy at the time. Sharon wasn’t with the management of any of that; she was still in LA. Ozzy, Don Arden and David Arden were in England. David phoned me and said, ‘I’ll give you a train ticket. Go up to Ozzy’s.’ They got me a first-class train ticket, I went up to Ozzy’s and he met me at the railway station. He had two other guys there – a guitarist and a drummer. I’m not sure who they were; I can’t even remember their names. We had a break, and I went out to the kitchen with Ozzy. It was just the two of us, and I said, ‘I’d be interested, but to be honest with you, I don’t think these other two guys are world-class. They’re nice guys and decent players, but they’re not star-quality.’ He said, ‘Hang on a minute.’ He walked out, went back into the rehearsal room built onto his house and said, ‘Pack up, fellas. It’s not working out. You can go home.’ That was it, on the spot. I thought, ‘Oh, fucking hell!’ That was when Ozzy said to me, ‘Look, I’ve met this guitar teacher in LA called Randy Rhoads.’ When he said ‘guitar teacher,’ I envisaged some sort of middle-aged bloke in a cardigan, glasses and slippers! So when we had trouble getting a guitarist, we had Randy flown over in November 1979.”

Daisley went on to offer specific details about the writing of “Over The Mountain” – including the drum intro in question.

“When we started to put that first album [1980’s Blizzard Of Ozz] together in 1979, we were all trying to come up with ideas for songs. We were all trying to put that first album together out of ideas that we had, but Randy never ever played that riff for ‘Over The Mountain’ when we were looking for material. I know that a lot of people think that the first two albums were done together, but they weren’t. The writing for Blizzard began in late '79, and the writing for [1981’s] Diary Of A Madman began in late 1980. The recording for Blizzard began in March 1980, and the recording for Diary began in February 1981 – roughly a year apart.

Left to right: Bob Daisley, Lee Kerslake, Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Rhoads (Photo courtesy of www.BobDaisley.com)

The writing started when Ozzy, Randy and I got together at the end of ’79. We had a roadie with us called Spencer, and he was filling in on drums. He played drums when we were writing this stuff, and I was taping it all on my tape machine just for reference so we wouldn’t forget anything. We were all trying to put songs together. If Randy had that riff, we would have heard it, and I would have a recording of it without a drum intro before Lee had joined the band.

When we first started playing ‘Over The Mountain’ during the writing session for Diary in January 1981, Randy had the basic riff. The writing sessions for Diary had begun in late 1980, but we hadn't heard Randy's ‘Over The Mountain’ riff until early 1981. I co-wrote the music with Randy for the rest of it, and Lee came up with some of the vocal melody. Ozzy wasn't even there. Also, Randy was playing the riff in eights, and I said, ‘Do it in 16ths.’ So that was new, and we’d been doing that for a little while before Lee did a drum intro thing to it. We felt, ‘Yeah, that’s great!’ But that drum intro wasn’t anything that any of us had heard before; it was Lee's – no one else's.

How would Randy, without a tape or a recording, relay a drum fill? What would he do, sing it to us? Even if he had, there’s no way that Lee would want to play or copy something that someone else had done, and there’s no way – out of principal – that I would use something that was stolen.

Lee was a name drummer from a big-name band; he would not be interested in using something from an unknown drummer from an unknown band, and even Randy was unknown at that stage. None of us had heard of Quiet Riot or Frankie Banali, and we'd never heard anything that any of them had played until Randy came on the scene in forming The Blizzard of Ozz with me and Ozzy. 

Maybe Frankie did play a drum fill intro thing to something that Randy had been playing at that time in LA when they first met Ozzy and that happened with Dana Strum. It’s possible that Randy had a riff that Frankie did a drum intro to, but it wasn’t the ‘Over The Mountain’ riff, or at least Randy never played it to us when we were looking for material for the first album. He didn't play it to any of us until we began writing for that second album, Diary, a year after the writing sessions for Blizzard.  

If Frankie Banali played a drum intro to a riff that Randy had played, it wasn’t what Lee played on ‘Over the Mountain,’ and I very much doubt that the riff was the ‘Over The Mountain’ one, either. I’m not calling Frankie Banali a liar; he may be mistaken or it could be a coincidence, but Lee came up with the drum intro for our song.” 

Frankie Banali (second from left) with the current incarnation of Quiet Riot (Photo source: www.facebook.com/quietriot)

 

Speaking to me from California, Banali maintained his side of the story – while also slightly opening the door to the possibility that this could all just be a very odd coincidence after all.

“I was and am a huge fan of Uriah Heep, so I always really enjoyed [Lee’s] drumming. As a matter of fact, we had a conversation about the whole triplet intro. When Quiet Riot played in Paris in 1983, he and [late Uriah Heep/Spiders From Mars/Wishbone Ash bassist] Trevor Bolder were our guests for dinner, and we had a conversation and I told him the story about playing with Randy and Ozzy. I told them that Ozzy had a little cassette ghetto blaster thing that he was recording things on. I told him that the triplet thing – which I’m sure he’d admit we both borrowed from John Bonham – [was something] I was putting in literally every song that I was playing with everyone, because I never knew when something was going to end up on a record or not. It’s one of my favorite riffs to play; I still play it.

[With] a lot of the riffs that Randy was coming up with, some of them were new riffs and some of the things were from previous Quiet Riot songs that were recorded or Quiet Riot songs that never were recorded. That triplet thing just happened in the studio. I think Dana Strum, who was the bass player when we did about a week’s worth of rehearsals, will probably verify that. I’ve never claimed that he took the riff that I did, because there are similarities but they’re different…So, [was it a] coincidence? Probably. But did I play it? Absolutely. Did Lee play triplets on the front of that? Absolutely. Did he get it from me? I don’t know that he got it from me; I don’t know that he ever heard any recordings or if it’s just a plain coincidence. But there’s no back-biting here. Whether a person believes it or not, it’s not like I’m going after Ozzy because I came up with a drum fill or I’m trying to make some money or trying to claim some success vis-a-vis Ozzy. I’m not; I’ve had plenty of my own success with Quiet Riot and many of the other artists [I’ve played with]. There is no controversy, but I’m not going to sit here and deny what I know to be the truth. I played the riff; it’s as simple as that. At the end of the day, does it really matter? I’m not more famous for it, and I didn’t make money off of it; Lee Kerslake is not more famous for it, and I’m sure he didn’t make any money for it, either…I’m more well-known for the intro to ‘Bang Your Head,’ ‘The Wild & the Young’ and ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ that I am for anything else, so it’s not like I need any extra pats on the back…It’s a triplet that John Bonham used that he actually got from famous Jazz drummer Max Roach. At the end of the day, it’s so derivative that does it really matter?”

As far as any of the recordings of his time with Osbourne, Rhoads and Strum actually surfacing after nearly four decades, Banali advises fans not to get their hopes up.

“It’s hard to say what happens with any of those things. I don’t know Ozzy’s M.O. – how he does things [and] how he functions. I can tell you from my own personal experience – and I doubt that this is the case with Ozzy – that back then, none of us had any money – certainly not money to go out and buy a cassette. More often that not, we used those cassettes and re-recorded over them over and over and over. Who knows if he still has it? Who knows what happened to it? Who know if he even remembers? I can definitely tell you with no reservation – and I don’t know if Ozzy would remember this or not – that there was a press junket around the time the QR III record was out. Since we were both part of the same label group, we were at the press junket. Ozzy pointed to me and said I was the one who came up with that into, Lee Kerslake recorded it and Tommy Aldridge got all the credit for it. So who knows?”

Speaking over the phone from England, Kerslake was quick to offer his take on things.

“I don’t understand why he wants to take credit for something that he didn’t do; I feel strongly about this. Frankie didn’t know us; he didn’t know the music. We did Blizzard Of Ozz, which I played drums on and co-wrote a couple of tracks, and then I did Diary Of A Madman and co-wrote six tracks. We had all new riffs coming out. Randy started playing the ‘Over The Mountain’ riff, and I said, ‘Yeah, hang on a minute. I have an idea for a great opener to get this to make people listen.’ The first 15 seconds are the most important in any song; that’s what gets a DJ to play it. It’s been that way for years. So I said, ‘I’m going to put this in.’ I played it, and Randy jumped through the roof, like, ‘Wow, man! That’s great!’ Bob said, "Yeah, mate. Fuckin’ great.’ I said, ‘Yeah! Let’s start there.’ That’s how we did it, and I was very proud of myself. In an interview, Tommy Aldridge was asked, ‘Did you do that track?’ He went, ‘No, no, no. I didn’t touch that; all that work was done by Lee.’”

Additionally, Kerslake questioned Banali’s memory of the conversation he claims to have had with him in 1983.

“We were in Paris, and Quiet Riot was playing there. I went to see them, and the singer [the late Kevin DuBrow] came up and said, ‘Randy was always talking about you and what a great drummer you were.’ That is the only thing I remember; I don’t remember having dinner with Frankie.”

Looking towards the future, everyone quoted in this piece is moving ahead with new music. Banali’s latest album with Quiet Riot (Road Rage) came out last Friday, Kerslake is currently working on a new album of his own and Daisley is gearing up to mix More Blues For Gary, his long-awaited all-star tribute album to his late friend and bandmate Gary Moore. As far as the “Over The Mountain” drum intro debate is concerned, Daisley and Banali seem willing to approach things in a diplomatic fashion.

“I have no animosity towards Frankie or anything like that,” offered Daisley. "I wish him well with the new Quiet Riot album.”

“I love Bob; there is no ‘clearing the air,’ there’s no animosity,” insisted Banali. “I think that the work that he did with Ozzy is phenomenal. He should have received a lot more credit than he did on those records. He’s just a ridiculously talented individual.”

Official Bob Daisley Website 

Official Quiet Riot Website

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