Post by ember on Feb 5, 2010 5:59:27 GMT -5
Bach ready to rock Halifax
’80s star joins Gun N’ Roses, Danko Jones tonight at Metro Centre
By STEPHEN COOKE Entertainment Reporter
Thu. Feb 4 - 4:54 AM
'We took over the club, and me and Bubbles jammed hard for hours. We were drinking some beers, but I remember saying, Let’s do Whole Lotta Love! and the guy running it said, But you already did it.'
SEBASTIAN BACH, describing a quintessential you-had-to-be-there moment at a Halifax bar
Technically, Sebastian Bach has never performed a show in Halifax. Not with the band that first brought him fame and fortune — ’80s hard rock stars Skid Row — or during the widely varied solo career that began in the ’90s.
But four years ago a few lucky Haligonians got the chance to hear the iron-lunged frontman blow off some steam at Cheers on karaoke night when he was in town to shoot a guest spot on Trailer Park Boys. Bach’s take on several rock classics with some of the show’s cast and crew remains a quintessential you-hadda-be-there moment.
"We took over the club, and me and Bubbles jammed hard for hours," says Bach, who joins Guns N’ Roses and Danko Jones at the Halifax Metro Centre tonight.
"We were drinking some beers, but I remember saying, ‘Let’s do Whole Lotta Love!’ and the guy running it said, ‘But you already did it.’
"We did a bunch of songs two or three times that night. I keep looking on YouTube for clips, but I can’t believe nobody filmed it. The whole night was nuts, it was a really great time."
Although Skid Row was a New Jersey-based band, Bach grew up in Peterborough, Ont., as Sebastian Bierk, the son of Canadian painter David Bierk, and brother to former NHL goalie Zac Bierk. He still considers himself a staunch Canuck, and notes it’s long been a thorn in his side that he hasn’t played the country coast-to-coast before.
"I’ve had so many (East Coast) fans on the Internet asking us to come, and I was supposed to play last time with Guns N’ Roses," Bach explains over the phone from a stop in Quebec City. "But it was around the time I was appearing on the show Gilmore Girls, and it just so happened that the very last episode I was in was filmed on the same day as the Halifax show.
"All these fans were going, ‘You screwed us again!’ and I was like, ‘No dude, the Gilmore Girls called me first!’ But now I finally get to play there."
Bach’s stint on Gilmore Girls as Gil, the lead singer of the fictional band Hep Alien, is one of the highlights of a post-Skid Row career that’s seen him go from Broadway productions of Jekyll and Hyde and The Rocky Horror Show to cable TV reality shows like VH1’s SuperGroup and CMT’s Gone Country, where he came out on top with some heartfelt honky-tonk on Battle With the Bottle.
But Bach says it’s work like the TV shows, including the current season of Celebrity Fit Club: Boot Camp, that let him fund his recording projects through his Get Off My Bach Productions, and enable him to take his band out on the road to play 10 cities in 11 days with G n’ R.
"It’s funny, when it rains, it pours," chuckles Bach. "I mean, I love playing live and going on the road, but most singers don’t like to do more than three nights in a row, and my agency asks me if I can do nine nights in a row, and I’m like, ‘Well, geez, I don’t know . . .’
"Then they show me the expense sheet for the tour bus and I guess I can do nine nights in a row. It’s called working."
At the moment, Bach is in the last stages of touring behind his most recent release Angel Down, a hard-hitting rock album that brought his voice back to the fore after years on the stage and the small screen.
Besides proving that his chops haven’t diminished with age — he still works with the same vocal coach that Jon Bon Jovi introduced him to in the ’80s — Angel Down is also notable for featuring a rare appearance by Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose on three songs during the epic wait for the release of Chinese Democracy.
"That’s my first Canadian content album, and I can’t believe Axl Rose qualifies as CanCon," Bach laughs. "That just blows me away. It only took me 22 years to be considered Canadian, and I finally am. I think it’s ironic that after I move out of the country for 20 years I’m considered to be CanCon. I could never figure out the rules, they’re very strange.
"I just asked Axl to do it after I sang on a song for Chinese Democracy, and that was that. He just asked when and what studio, and showed up to do three songs. It’s so strange how people’s perception of him via the press differs from the reality. Axl’s a musician; he’s not interested in the fame part of what we do — he’s really NOT interested — and he just loves making his music.
"For me it’s just a friendship thing. You make a record and you want different instruments and different voices, and Axl Rose’s voice is as unique as it gets."
For those who are wondering if Bach reaches back to his catalogue of hits with Skid Row in his solo show, the answer is definitely yes. He jokes that having 21-year-old hotshot guitarist Nick Sterling in his band lets him get away with doing songs like 18 and Life and Youth Gone Wild, and while he’s not exactly the best of friends with his former bandmates — still going after reviving Skid Row over a decade ago — he looks back fondly on the band’s success in its heyday and how its songs continue to resurface.
"I headlined in Beijing a couple of years ago in front of 10,000 people with my solo band, and they were telling me that China didn’t allow rock music. It was extremely underground and hard to find an album or a cassette or whatever," he recalls.
"But they told me that Skid Row became huge there in 1989, because of the timing when the country started to open up to Western music, and we were one of the first rock bands to find a bigger audience there. It’s amazing to find out that Skid Row is like Led Zeppelin to them.
"In Russia it was kind of the same thing; we played the Moscow Music Peace Festival in 1989 with Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi and the Scorpions, and I was just back there in December. . . . I can’t believe I’ve played Moscow twice and never in Halifax. That makes no sense."
thechronicleherald.ca/ArtsLife/1165747.html
’80s star joins Gun N’ Roses, Danko Jones tonight at Metro Centre
By STEPHEN COOKE Entertainment Reporter
Thu. Feb 4 - 4:54 AM
'We took over the club, and me and Bubbles jammed hard for hours. We were drinking some beers, but I remember saying, Let’s do Whole Lotta Love! and the guy running it said, But you already did it.'
SEBASTIAN BACH, describing a quintessential you-had-to-be-there moment at a Halifax bar
Technically, Sebastian Bach has never performed a show in Halifax. Not with the band that first brought him fame and fortune — ’80s hard rock stars Skid Row — or during the widely varied solo career that began in the ’90s.
But four years ago a few lucky Haligonians got the chance to hear the iron-lunged frontman blow off some steam at Cheers on karaoke night when he was in town to shoot a guest spot on Trailer Park Boys. Bach’s take on several rock classics with some of the show’s cast and crew remains a quintessential you-hadda-be-there moment.
"We took over the club, and me and Bubbles jammed hard for hours," says Bach, who joins Guns N’ Roses and Danko Jones at the Halifax Metro Centre tonight.
"We were drinking some beers, but I remember saying, ‘Let’s do Whole Lotta Love!’ and the guy running it said, ‘But you already did it.’
"We did a bunch of songs two or three times that night. I keep looking on YouTube for clips, but I can’t believe nobody filmed it. The whole night was nuts, it was a really great time."
Although Skid Row was a New Jersey-based band, Bach grew up in Peterborough, Ont., as Sebastian Bierk, the son of Canadian painter David Bierk, and brother to former NHL goalie Zac Bierk. He still considers himself a staunch Canuck, and notes it’s long been a thorn in his side that he hasn’t played the country coast-to-coast before.
"I’ve had so many (East Coast) fans on the Internet asking us to come, and I was supposed to play last time with Guns N’ Roses," Bach explains over the phone from a stop in Quebec City. "But it was around the time I was appearing on the show Gilmore Girls, and it just so happened that the very last episode I was in was filmed on the same day as the Halifax show.
"All these fans were going, ‘You screwed us again!’ and I was like, ‘No dude, the Gilmore Girls called me first!’ But now I finally get to play there."
Bach’s stint on Gilmore Girls as Gil, the lead singer of the fictional band Hep Alien, is one of the highlights of a post-Skid Row career that’s seen him go from Broadway productions of Jekyll and Hyde and The Rocky Horror Show to cable TV reality shows like VH1’s SuperGroup and CMT’s Gone Country, where he came out on top with some heartfelt honky-tonk on Battle With the Bottle.
But Bach says it’s work like the TV shows, including the current season of Celebrity Fit Club: Boot Camp, that let him fund his recording projects through his Get Off My Bach Productions, and enable him to take his band out on the road to play 10 cities in 11 days with G n’ R.
"It’s funny, when it rains, it pours," chuckles Bach. "I mean, I love playing live and going on the road, but most singers don’t like to do more than three nights in a row, and my agency asks me if I can do nine nights in a row, and I’m like, ‘Well, geez, I don’t know . . .’
"Then they show me the expense sheet for the tour bus and I guess I can do nine nights in a row. It’s called working."
At the moment, Bach is in the last stages of touring behind his most recent release Angel Down, a hard-hitting rock album that brought his voice back to the fore after years on the stage and the small screen.
Besides proving that his chops haven’t diminished with age — he still works with the same vocal coach that Jon Bon Jovi introduced him to in the ’80s — Angel Down is also notable for featuring a rare appearance by Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose on three songs during the epic wait for the release of Chinese Democracy.
"That’s my first Canadian content album, and I can’t believe Axl Rose qualifies as CanCon," Bach laughs. "That just blows me away. It only took me 22 years to be considered Canadian, and I finally am. I think it’s ironic that after I move out of the country for 20 years I’m considered to be CanCon. I could never figure out the rules, they’re very strange.
"I just asked Axl to do it after I sang on a song for Chinese Democracy, and that was that. He just asked when and what studio, and showed up to do three songs. It’s so strange how people’s perception of him via the press differs from the reality. Axl’s a musician; he’s not interested in the fame part of what we do — he’s really NOT interested — and he just loves making his music.
"For me it’s just a friendship thing. You make a record and you want different instruments and different voices, and Axl Rose’s voice is as unique as it gets."
For those who are wondering if Bach reaches back to his catalogue of hits with Skid Row in his solo show, the answer is definitely yes. He jokes that having 21-year-old hotshot guitarist Nick Sterling in his band lets him get away with doing songs like 18 and Life and Youth Gone Wild, and while he’s not exactly the best of friends with his former bandmates — still going after reviving Skid Row over a decade ago — he looks back fondly on the band’s success in its heyday and how its songs continue to resurface.
"I headlined in Beijing a couple of years ago in front of 10,000 people with my solo band, and they were telling me that China didn’t allow rock music. It was extremely underground and hard to find an album or a cassette or whatever," he recalls.
"But they told me that Skid Row became huge there in 1989, because of the timing when the country started to open up to Western music, and we were one of the first rock bands to find a bigger audience there. It’s amazing to find out that Skid Row is like Led Zeppelin to them.
"In Russia it was kind of the same thing; we played the Moscow Music Peace Festival in 1989 with Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi and the Scorpions, and I was just back there in December. . . . I can’t believe I’ve played Moscow twice and never in Halifax. That makes no sense."
thechronicleherald.ca/ArtsLife/1165747.html
