Bullet
LaVolta
This article originally appeared in NFH #18 in
the winter of 1990.
"Starting a band
is tough", says Bullet LaVolta front man Yukki Gipe. "We've just been
really lucky I think for the most part."
"That's totally
true", agrees bass player Bill Whelan. "I mean, we think we're a good
band and stuff, but the timing worked out really well for us. I think if we started out
two or three years earlier there were just so many different things happening in
Boston, so many bands going on, that we could have been overshadowed."
Todd Phillips, the
new drummer, adds: "The whole post-Burma thing was so huge in that time
period, too."
And Bill completes
the discussion: "We just were at the right time; lots of bands that are around
Boston that have been around Boston for six or seven years, they just get into this
rut, even if they're headlining, of playing every other month at some club in town.
It's just so hard to get past those stages, and conditions have been just right for
us to exploit."
This brief
interchange perhaps indicates one reason why Bullet LaVolta have the potential to
demonstrate some real staying power, because in spite of their modesty it's hard to
imagine Bullet LaVolta ever being overshadowed. Never mind their downright friendly
attitude off stage; strap on their guitars and you'll find that their music is some
of the most viciously aggressive stuff you've ever heard. And if we're going to
talk about Boston bands, I'll drop the words "some of" from the previous
sentence, because no Boston band, hardcore or otherwise, has ever hit me as hard as
Bullet LaVolta.
The great thing about
them is that they do it with tunes, too. Not that we're talking about pop songs
that are merely charged up a little, but there's definite melody to Bullet LaVolta
and great hooks that make the songs stick in your head after one or two spins of
the records. The initial impression I formed of them was that they were fusing
hardcore and speed metal, but it goes quite a bit beyond anything as generic
sounding as that. Bullet LaVolta pump their music full of personality, so that
there's lots of variety from song to song, yet each song is distinctly a Bullet LaVolta
song...if you're familiar with their sound and someone plays you a new Bullet
LaVolta track, you'll know who it is right away. The result appeals to a lot of
different types of people.
"But it's
probably a lot of people who used to listen to hardcore, and have also grown up
listening to Kiss, and Yukki's seen Ted Nugent seven times, something worth
mentioning", says guitarist Clay Tarver. "And that's sort of where it
came from, and people are into that. The other thing was that Boston had a crowd
which was really well listened, there's a ton of great stations there, and they all
know. When we were first starting a flyer for a singer, we listed all these bands
like Raw Power, Husker Du, the Chills, and all this stuff, and Yukki calls up and
goes "Well, do you mean the record Raw Power or the Italian band?"
People listen to so much stuff. I mean, I don't think he's a product of Boston at all, but
there are just a lot of people that know."
Adds Bill: "In
that sense Boston is one of the best places you can be because it's really hard to
be narrow minded in Boston. You have to struggle to be narrow minded, because you
get to hear a lot of different stuff. I think pretty much everyone in the band
listens to a whole range of stuff, and it doesn't all come through, but enough of
it does. When we were in Europe, in different places people listen to like
exclusively different things. Like we were in England, and you'd ask people about
certain bands, and it's like they're these taboo things you can't even talk about.
And it's like harmless bands, too, like Fairport Convention. You can't talk about
them...they're old farts. You could go any place and there's certain things that
somebody in this band likes that is excluded."
"Yeah, we were
fairly snotty about it", says Clay. "Like Todd's a great example...he's a
drummer who's a huge Volcano Suns fan, and it's really hard to find a kick-ass
drummer who's really into that. That's what we need, though and it's worked out
great."
To give you a little
more idea of the variety imbedded in Bullet LaVolta's lineup, the fifth member is
guitar player Ken Chambers. Ken was the main force behind the great Moving Targets,
a Boston band that played a sort of tough power pop that reminds me of bands like
the early Jam, the Chords, or the Happy Hate Me Nots. Yet making the move into a
band like Bullet LaVolta seems to have been a logical transition for him.
Yukki Gipe isn't very
tall, and he's thin as a reed, but when Bullet LaVolta's live set kicks in, he's
one of the more frightening people you'll ever see. The transformation from the
quiet, reserved guy of a few hours earlier is amazing...he leaps around the stage
and snarls out vocals in a voice that's impossibly huge for a guy of his size. His
facial expressions remind me of those old Sex Pistols videos with Johnny Rotten.
You can almost feel the message: "We mean it, man!" in the power of the
performance. The rest of the band is equally dynamic...when these guys play
they are totally into it. It's an intense experience. Yet in an interview in Dagger,
Yukki said that they are "probably about number three of the top ten bands in
Boston". OK, so who's ahead?
"I guess we're
still sort of an independent band", says Clay, "but as far as that goes,
I think we have the biggest draw, don't we, by far? Like Dinosaur is not really
from Boston, the Pixies..."
Todd agrees.
"Yeah, we're drawing pretty huge these days. We're playing pretty rarely, like
once every three months, at home."
"When we were in
Europe", says Bill, "everybody was like "Oh, the Boston hardcore
scene...", which they saw as being from the Pixies, to Ed's Redeeming
Qualities to Bullet LaVolta, but they're like "oh, it's this really happening
thing". But it's not really...there's like nothing."
"If anything,
we're like one of the only the bands that is really doing anything", says
Clay, "and so as a result, we've done really well. And once the record came
out, we played like twice there and did shows to about 1800 people."
Bullet LaVolta have
the usual story about touring Europe that most American bands seem to come back
with. They went last June for about six weeks, touring mostly with labelmates the
Lemonheads. The pairing worked really well because the Lemonheads were big draws in
England while Bullet LaVolta were big in Germany, so the result was big crowds
everywhere. Their German popularity was helped by a licensing deal they had with
the label Funhouse, who apparently sold a pile of records but conveniently went
bankrupt before paying much on them. Says Todd: "It was great. It's a totally
different feeling over there. We were surprisingly successful, it was really a scream.
They're really into American guitar bands right now; it's like the big wave.
Something from Boston or Seattle, they've moved into the spotlight."
Their records are a
real scream, too. Their first, a six track ep, features a cover with a welder
showering sparks everywhere in a stark white-on-black background. The music matches
the image; scorching white-hot guitar riffs and a razor sharp production.
"Dead Wrong" is the highlight, a song that drills into your brain with
buzzing guitar lines that match the electricity of handling high tension wires bare
handed. Half the record was recorded in March of 1987, but after that guitar player Corey
Brennan went to Europe and it was at that point that Ken joined. He plays on all of
side two, which was done in the fall of 1987. The only noticeable difference is
that the guitars are a little more complex...everything is just as strong on both
sides.
In 1988 the band
recorded their full lp, The Gift. Originally released by Taang like their
first record, this one got them signed to RCA, who has taken over flogging it from
Taang. Collectors should take note that Taang actually put out a few CDs of The
Gift with all of the first ep on it as well, while RCA's CD adds just a couple
tracks from the ep. At any rate, the new lp is no change in direction; it's just
that many more great tracks with that same menacing attack. It's got its share of
great ones; the opening "X-Fire" sounds like an amped-up Moving Targets
song, while other songs like "Underground Well" or "Birth Of
Death" are loaded with power. There's not a track worth missing on the thing;
it's the best record out of Boston in a long time in my book.
One foolish
assumption that I've often made in the past is that a band that makes cool music is
likely to be aware of a lot of other music going on around them. This turns out to
rarely be the case...many bands are only vaguely aware of the sea of independent
music in which they are swimming. Not so with Bullet LaVolta; get them talking about other
bands and the conversation flies from one group to another with dizzying rapidity.
These guys are fans of all sorts of things. Apart from some of the references already
mentioned, there were enthusiastic words for bands like feedtime, the Hard-Ons,
Butthole Surfers, Mudhoney, Thrust, God, Cosmic Psychos, Love Dolls and Lazy
Cowgirls, plus several other names I had never heard and couldn't figure out when
transcribing the rather chaotic sounding interview tape that formed the basis for
this article.
The Hard-Ons are
especially popular with Bullet LaVolta as they did their first significant US tour
together. "We played with them all the way through the mid west. We had a
great time, we're really very good friends with them now. They're great people. The
thing about the tour with the Hard-Ons was that it was our first venture at all and
their first here, and it wasn't put together well, so we were braving untested
waters for both of us. So we had a really good time even though not too many people
turned up. But I've heard that they're just immensely big at home."
On stage, Yukki fills
in the dead space between one killer song and the next: "Imagine a world
without bars for bands to play in...imagine a world where there are only party
lines with everybody talking at once..."
"We already have
that", says Bill, and they tear into the next one.
The US seems to be in
bad shape for good places to play, though, and people don't turn out for shows in
very large numbers. It's probably good that people aren't drinking as much here as
they do other countries, but the fact that the music scene is so tied in with
drinking places means that the music scene is suffering from this trend. In
Australia at pubs I went to many people drank six to ten beers in one evening and
the pubs were packed, and having a band was a great way to bring people in to
drink. Cover charges are low or absent and there are good bands to see every night.
Bullet LaVolta experienced the same thing in Europe, according to Todd: "That's
what it's like in Germany. One place we played all the fans drank all the beer at
the club...there was no more beer left, and then after the show there was like 50
people passed out all over the place."
Well, I don't know
how it went for Bullet LaVolta on the rest of their west coast swing, but for San
Diego, they were lucky if there were 50 people in attendance in all states of
intoxication combined. I seem to be singing this tune about every band that comes
here, which is monotonous to do, but I really would prefer not to wait until 1998
for the reformed Bullet LaVolta to play the Bachannal to a thousand adoring fans
who missed them the first time through and have to puke when the 91X van pulls up
outside, which is what just happened for the Buzzcocks last week. Bullet LaVolta are a
band for these times, and they should be heard in these times. WAKE UP!
