On the 27th October, I caught up with Ryan Roxie over Skype and we discussed a whole bunch of stuff – everything from Roxie 77, Alice Cooper, kids, Spotify, cassettes to things going ‘viral’. I had originally planned to [...]]]>

Ryan Roxie - Photo by: Ulf Magnusson Photography

Once again, I find myself thanking a random piece of technology – Thank you Skype!

On the 27th October, I caught up with Ryan Roxie over Skype and we discussed a whole bunch of stuff – everything from Roxie 77, Alice Cooper, kids, Spotify, cassettes to things going ‘viral’. I had originally planned to edit the audio track down to something around 10 minutes long, but after talking to Ryan Roxie for over 40 minutes, I realised this wasn’t going to happen. I tried – I really did. I cut HUGE chunks out of the interview, but every time I did that it felt like I was extracting teeth without anaesthetic – it was too painful. Too many funny, interesting and insightful things were said to cut anything out. So, I was left with a dilemma – I had a compelling 40 minute interview, but I knew that these days no-one really has the time to sit down and check out an interview for that long (especially if you’re having a sneaky look at the site while you’re at work/school!), so I decided to transcribe it… but that didn’t seem like quite enough… so I’ve added snippets of audio (added to YouTube videos so you can easily share them with your friends, neighbours, etc) as well. One interview – 2 mediums…. There is, after all, two sides to every story (sorry for the pun, but I couldn’t resist it).

Anyway, that’s more than enough from me… ENJOY…

Lou: Hi, how are you?

Ryan Roxie: I’m doing well. You can see the crying baby, right? [referring to his avatar on Skype] That was my daughter when she was like 3 months old, but for some reason that picture sticks… it makes people laugh.

Lou: How old is she now?

Ryan Roxie: Now she’s 5 years old, but she’s 5 years old going on about 17! We had about an hour and a half talk last night, like an adult talk. I could believe it! 5 years old and she’s keeping me up until about nine thirty at night talking about every single drama at her nursery school. And there is drama that goes on in nursery school apparently. I was totally unaware and I was totally oblivious to it and now I know all of the inner goings on at a pre-school [laughs]

Lou: It’s like a TV show!

Ryan Roxie: It’s actually more dramatic! I’m telling you it’s like the House of Rehab or Lost or whatever those shows are… but this is way more. This is five year olds and four year olds starting to play the game already. It’s weird how it works. If boys like girls, instead of going up to them and actually asking them out they actually push them. It’s a little bit caveman! [laughs]….

Lou: When she is 16 or 17 she’s gonna kill you for putting that photo up!

Ryan Roxie: [laughs] You know when she’s 16 years old she’s going to have so many more photos that she’s put up herself already! She likes to take pictures all the time. She’s already taken photos of her and her brother being completely nuts… like dressed up as cats and stuff… so, yeah, it probably won’t be my fault… But I’m prepared! And… c’mon, a daughter is God’s way of paying back every guitar player [laughs].

Lou: You recently put a track on your site called “When You See God”. Is there a story behind it?

Ryan Roxie: Well it’s one of those really heartfelt songs that for a long time I was actually a bit too much of a coward to put it out because it’s been one of those songs that I wrote many years ago, but I’ve been refining it ever since. I kinda think that this 2010 version is as close as I’ll get to where I want the song to be. Sometimes, the reality of it is, that certain songs come in two minutes and other songs come in a matter of ten years. Some songs take a long time to develop until you say “yes, this is the way I want it” and some songs never even make it to that point. I’m still developing some songs that were ideas over 15 years ago. So it just depends… but this is one of those ones that I always felt was really close to my heart. But I was a bit trepidacious to put it out at first because I didn’t want it to be conceived as being ‘anti patriotic’. I come from the United States where there was a time a few years ago where, if you didn’t support the government or the government’s decision, then all of a sudden you supported something else, and you didn’t support the troops… which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Especially from my point of view because I played for so many of these guys right before they were going off to Iraq, or when they had breaks on their tours of duty… they’d come to an Alice Cooper show or they’d come to a Roxie 77 show just for entertainment. I actually played for these guys and there was a couple of shows I played in Virginia right off the base camp…. and it was a week later that some of those guys were going off to Iraq and that was like their last Friday night out and who knows if all of them came back? I hope they did. So I felt really close to the troops when I wrote the song and I tried to see it through their eyes. It is a song about basically flying down from Heaven and dropping into Hell… in a place that you don’t wanna be. You don’t wanna be there anyway. And , yes, you’re fighting for freedom or yes, you’re fighting for what somebody tells you you’re fighting for… but at the end of the day who’s position is it to play God? I don’t know if it’s any of our positions to say we’re God or to act like we’re God… or to make those decisions and I think it’s a pretty hard decision to take another person’s life. I feel a lot for these guys that have had to go through that.
It’s not one of my lighter songs, let’s be honest! It’s not that it’s not hopeful, because it is hopeful. That is sort of a tie-in thing with my songs – I try to tie in a sense of hope. There’s enough hopelessness and there’s enough darkness going on in the world today. The music that I write, for the most part, is supposed to be 3 minutes and 30 seconds to take you away and take you to another place. But, there are certain songs like this [“When You See God”] that will hopefully take you to a place where you think about something for a second and maybe come up with a solution yourself. If you come up with a solution yourself or if you come up with some sort of idea on how to change things then the song has done its magic… and that’s what it’s about.

Lou: What sort of feedback have you received for it so far?

Ryan Roxie: So far… everyone appreciates the fact that it was just me and an acoustic guitar singing a heart-felt song with some lyrics that made them think… and it’s one of those things where people have decided to take it upon themselves to promote the song and tell their friends. It’s exactly what I wanted. The goal of the song was for this to be one of those songs that maybe catches on not right away, but builds up into something that 6 months, a year, 2 years from now where people regard the song as something that was important. I really do think that it’s an important song and I don’t usually talk about Roxie 77 songs as being important because I’m realistic, and know at the end of the day we’re entertainers and if we start to take ourselves too seriously or get too political then no-one else will take us seriously. I tread lightly on the fact that I think it’s an important song because at the end of the day, hey – if it was different lyrics then it would be regarded as something else. I still think it would be a nice melody and a catchy pop song.

Lou: On your website you’ve got the video for the song. Has anyone sent in their own versions of the video?

Ryan Roxie: I actually have our Roxie 77 team going through it now. There has been a couple versions that have been sent in and they’re going though them and seeing if everything’s legit and the footage that they use isn’t going to completely get us in trouble! If does, hey, maybe it’s even more controversy, who cares?! But yeah, there have been a few that will come up in the future and, like I said, you’re more than welcome to download the song for free and you have my blessing to use it in your own video and send it to me and I’ll put it right up alongside all of the other videos that are out there for the song.

Lou: You mentioned downloading for free there and at some point all of the tracks from your current album, “Two Sides To Every Story”, have been made available as free downloads. What made you want to go down that route?

Ryan Roxie: Because at this point we’re almost back to square one with music. The musician has always been the guy where it’s like “oh man, it’s not fair these big companies are making all the money and we make zero money” and it’s like well, our only way to actually seize back and get back some of the power is to say “y’know what? Have the music!”. It’s our marketing tool now. It’s our promotion. But when you come to the show, you will buy a t-shirt if you like the band and you will buy a ticket to the show. You’ll support us in one way or another. So… even if it was downloadable and we were making money, say 99 cents for a song, when it comes down to this person getting their piece of the pie and this person getting their other piece of the pie, it really adds up to not very much. The idea of giving my songs away with a conscious-free download, and that was the concept that I came up with, was why not give the fan or the listener the best possible version of your work for them to appreciate and, hopefully, for them to turn someone else onto it.

I’m the old school guy that wants to sell a tangible CD that you can hold and touch and that’s all in the works… it’s gonna come out… but 99% of people today, even if they do buy a CD, they stick it in their computer and put it onto their iPod and then the CD goes onto the shelf never to be seen again. I’d much rather have the songs go directly to their iPod, you get them for free, but then when they want to support the band they can buy a t-shirt that they can wear and people can actually see it. Or you buy some kind of merchandise and people actually can see what band you’re supporting. That’s why, to me, songs now are escapism for three and a half minutes and they’re also a really good way to market your own brand – especially if you’ve been around for as long as I have! I’m one of those guys that you might never have heard of my name Ryan Roxie, but I’ve been around for a while and I’m not hoping to go away any time soon! I’ve still got a lot of things in the works – a lot of bands that I’m working with, and a lot of projects that I’m working with too, so hopefully I can be around in this scene for a while. I think you have to adapt to the way that the musical environment is and right now people are accustomed to not paying for music [laughs]. Unfortunately that’s one of the drawbacks of the Internet. But, that might be a con, but the pro is I have a million more people… For instance, this song “When You See God”, 10 years ago or 15 years ago when all this stuff was in its infancy, it would have been much harder to release a song the way I did and have it be so universally known so quickly.
I hate to use those really common tags like something going ‘viral’ or whatever, because it sounds like something I used to catch at the Rainbow Bar & Grill! I don’t wanna get anything viral! [laughs] But now you kinda want stuff viral, y’know! You want things to go viral…. but let me tell you, in my day, hanging out in Los Angeles, you didn’t want anything viral – it was bad! [laughs] But now it’s a good thing. I actually think that with all of the bitching and moaning that the artists have about not being able to get paid because of Internet, it’s because of the Internet that all of these artists are able to hang around and still have this communication and relationship with their fans. I still have contact with fans and people who listened to my first album with Electric Angels… and they’re fans now of all of the bands I’ve been in right up to Roxie 77. Hopefully they’re still fans! [laughs]

I’m just curious, how did you find out about my music?

Lou: A friend of mine actually gave me the Dad’s Porno Mag CD and “Peace, Love and Armageddon”. [Incidentally, it’s a friend that I’ve lost touch with – please feel free to drop me a line if you see this!]

Ryan Roxie: So you learned about it through the old school method of a tangible CD? It wasn’t a file at that point?

Lou: Nope, it was actually CDs.

Ryan Roxie: I salute you for being old school! [laughs] It wasn’t a cassette though!

Lou: No, not that old school! Not vinyl either!

Ryan Roxie: Cassette’s the real old school. I was just talking about that to a friend. Vinyl’s one of those things that’s so classic that everybody wants to bring it back, but I don’t think anyone’s talking about bringing something back on cassette! We forget so quickly how much the cassette tape was so much a part of our lives for so many years. I mean, for so many years the only you could listen to music in car was if you had a cassette player!

Lou: Are you gonna bring it back?

Ryan Roxie: Absolutely not! Cassettes are horrible! [laughs] I might package a zip drive or whatever it is into cassette packaging. I love packaging! But, c’mon, you have to roll with the changes and if someone offers you a better and easier way to do something then you shouldn’t just stick to your old ways just because they’re your old ways. Like I said, I’m probably one of the last rock ‘n’ rollers who is able to say that they’ve made records on every format possible. I mean, I made it on big old magnetic two inch tape, and it’s gone through all of the different phases of digital recording so I’ve been able to make albums on every format possible and I do still prefer actually doing drums and some amount of basic tracks on tape. It does give a certain thickness to it and a certain breathability… a certain airiness to the sound. But, c’mon, our ears our accustomed to hearing things out of iPhone speakers and how much hi-fi is really there? [laughs]

The most bizarre thing is that when we listen to music in our own private setting our ears are sort of downgrading because now we listen to it on either computer speakers, or we listen to it on iPhone speakers or whatever it is… but then when we go to a concert the sound quality has got so much better. Now if we go to a live concert we almost expect to, no – we demand it actually, that it sounds as good as the record… which in my day, back when I started playing live shows, we were lucky if you could even hear any separation between the musicians and the feedback and everything. The live sound has changed so much over the years. It’s quite a weird concept. Now at a live show we demand real hi-fi clarity and we not so much like that when it comes to our own personal listening. Psychology!

Lou: What do you use to listen to music on at home?

Ryan Roxie: Well, I’m actually lucky that I have a pair of studio monitors that I have hooked up. I only have them hooked up because I think I’m too cheap to actually go out and buy a really nice stereo! [laughs] But, my studio monitors are hooked up to my Mac. And there’s a thing called Spotify out here… I don’t know if you guys have it yet, but it was invented here in Sweden, and it’s one of those revolutionary things that’s gonna change the way we listen to music and the way we enjoy music and I actually love it. I do listen to it through a set of studio monitors and it sounds really nice.

Lou: As well as the conscious-free downloads you mentioned earlier, you also have the Split the Profit downloads. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Ryan Roxie: Yeah, the conscious-free download is a way to make the listener not feel guilty at all about downloading my songs. I want you to download them, I don’t want you to feel like you’re doing anything wrong. If you feel like ‘you know what, I want to contribute to Roxie 77, I wanna donate something to this project”, what I’ve done is this thing called splitting the profits. So anything that you donate… so basically, if you buy one of the songs – I think 77 cents is the minimum… I love the numerology of it… but a lot of people do it for a lot more than that – I take the whole amount and I split it in half and give half of it to charity and the other half we take and put it back into the band. So far it’s been very successful. The three charities that we work with have all got donations on a regular basis and that’s Doctors Without Borders, The Art of Elysium that provides music for children in hospitals in the Los Angeles area and then the third one is the Love, Hope, Strength Foundation which is a cancer foundation and it was set up by the lead singer of The Alarm. So it’s working out well so far.

Lou: Do you have any idea on how much you’ve made for those charities?

Ryan Roxie: I really don’t. I mean, if I said that it was in the thousands range then maybe that would be ok. The thing is we’re not at the point where we’re raking in tonnes of money, but 50% is going to the charities and we hope to keep it going. The whole idea of Splitting the Profits and Conscious-Free download is to inspire, hopefully, a bigger artist like someone who sells millions of copies to do the same thing… and I can just imagine if some sort of hip hop artist or a really big pop artist was to do the same exact concept the amount of revenue that would be generated through something like that. My small rock band Roxie 77 is doing its part. I hope that in the future it keeps growing and growing, but at this point it serves as an example and an inspiration for other bands.

Lou: So hopefully someone else will pick it up.

Ryan Roxie: We can only hope, we can only hope. That’s the thing, it has to start somewhere. If you have a good idea you should try to implement it, instead of just saying “that’s a good idea” and then not testing it. I came up with a lot of ideas over the past couple of years and I actually implement them. One was the album title for this last Roxie 77 album “Two Sides To Every Story”. We made a 12 song album and recorded it electric, the way my rock band would record it, and then I took the exact same songs with the exact same words and we did acoustic versions of each and that doesn’t mean just breaking down the song and doing the same chord structure – it means going for different arrangements. The concept was that to everything there’s always two sides to every story and I wanted the music to show that. Every song I wanted the listener to hear two different sides.

Ryan Roxie - Photo by: Fredrik Etoall Photography

Lou: Out of all the songs on the album, which is your favourite done both electrically and acoustically?

Ryan Roxie: Wow, that is a very hard question for a guy like me to answer because they’re all kinda like my children. I know it sounds clichéd to say that [laughs]… Alright, they’re all like my illegitimate children! One thing that was really cool that I can sort of relate the story to something that Alice [Cooper] told me a while ago, if I use the whole children reference, was when I had my son, Lennon, and we were about to have our daughter named Natasha Grace, I actually asked Alice “I’m gonna have a second kid and I’m really worried that I’m not going to be able to love them the same. I’m always gonna love the first one a little bit more or I’m gonna love the second one more. I’m confused.” And he said “You know what? I have 3 kids, Roxie, and I honestly love them all the same”. It’s really true. I don’t choose my son or my daughter. I don’t say, “I like this one more”… there’s certain things that they do that can annoy you more or less than the other [laughs], but when it comes to overall love you love them exactly the same… and if I take that back to the song reference, it’s really hard for me to choose . I put them on the album because, in their own way, they are special little children and they’re stories – each one of them holds something. I can tell you that the one that kinda always makes me feel good both electric and acoustically, because they’re so different in versions but I enjoy listening to both versions back-to-back, is “The Question”. Because “The Question” is one of those songs that, to me, it’s just such a straight-ahead, Oasis-y, rock song when we play it electrically, but then when you take the acoustic version of that, it all of a sudden becomes some sort of Carole King / James Taylor sort of singer/songwriter vibe. I honestly like both versions just as much.

Lou: That was a big answer!

Ryan Roxie: [laughs] There’s gonna be a lot of editing on that one! Sorry about that! I think that if you’re looking for a short interview you should probably ask me those questions like “What’s your favourite colour?”

Lou: [laughs] What is your favourite colour?

Ryan Roxie: Silver and black! [laughs] I’m actually going through my “white phase”. Everything in my apartment is white, my couch, my furniture, my speakers, my TV even, my table. So I’m going through that weird – I don’t know if it’s weird – I think everyone goes through it. You kinda feel like if everything’s white and clean in your personal life it must be really clean and together inside your head. I’m not sure if that’s the truth! [laughs] I’m not sure if that’s the truth at all! I must ask my white iPhone…

Lou: You’ve mentioned Alice a bit today, do you still speak to him?

Ryan Roxie: Actually, yeah. Not that long ago, Alice Cooper came into town and Roxie 77 opened up the shows… it was actually just last year. So we had a good long talk then… and I just found out that recently he finally got that well deserved nomination to go into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, so I sent him an email… but I didn’t send it to him because he is obviously so old school that he doesn’t have an email address! But I sent it to his wife because I know that’s the best way to reach Alice. I sent her an email and I congratulated him and he was very proud of the fact that he did it. And he should be. It’s one of those things that’s been coming for a long time and there’s no-one that I think deserves it more than him because he really has influenced so many rock ‘n’ roll artists.

Lou: Who has been the biggest influence for you?

Ryan Roxie: I would definitely say as far as overall Rock ‘n’ Roll guru and big brother I never had, it’s gotta be Alice. He’s taught me not just about music and how to sell a song, he’s taught me how to sort of make a living in the music business as well… even after [I was with] Alice Cooper. I’ll always have his name on my shoulder as one of those guys that I was very proud to jam with and it’s an honour to have played with Alice Cooper and I’ll always have that… but at the same time I’ve been trying my best to make my own legacy and make my own name for myself through the music that I’ve been doing. He’s the one that taught me how to use your own brand and make the most out of what you do, because if you think about it, with Alice there’s so many people that know him from so many different genres – some people know him as a golfer, some people know him as a radio host, some people know him as a 70s rocker, some people know him as a 80s rocker…

Lou: Or even an actor.

Ryan Roxie: Yeah! And an actor! I’m just trying to be known now as a… er… ballet dancer! [laughs] No, I haven’t got into that yet, but I’m a hell of a stripper and hopefully known as one of those guys that always brings out the best in whatever he associated with – whether it’s a band, whether it’s a TV show… y’know, the current TV show that I’m developing out here in Sweden, or whether it’s something completely different. I always want the people that follow me to know that I’m involved in something that’s quality… and I think with the artists and the people who I have played with so far and the things that have done have kept a pretty high standard of quality… and I’m happy about that.

Lou: So what’s the TV show you’re working on?

Ryan Roxie: It’s called “The Big Rock Show with Ryan Roxie” and it’s in development now and we’ve been developing it for a little while. It started off a few years back as a podcast, but then in 2010 I got this really good idea to turn it into a TV show. I didn’t realise how hard it is to actually develop a TV show! [laughs] But I’ve got it all together – I work with a film company, a really good producer, a really good director and we have a concept down and I’m really hoping that in early 2011 it will be premiered and after that we can continue to do it and hopefully start within Sweden and Scandinavia and then spread out through Europe. Then hopefully we can make that jump over to the States and the rest of the world. Think of us as sort of like the Herpes virus, it has to start somewhere! [laughs] But then pretty soon we can catch on all over the world.

Lou: We’ve gone back to being ‘viral’ again now!

Ryan Roxie: See! That’s called a tie-in! And if you’re a stand up comedian everyone knows about a tie-in – you have to bring back that first joke to the end of your set. Wow! I know too much about stand up comedy. [laughs]

Lou: You could always go into stand up comedy later.

Ryan Roxie: Well, I’ve always said that the only job that’s harder than being a musician is being a stand up comic. At least with being a musician, you’re there with 3 or 4 other guys and the whole audience hates you, at least you can look back at the stage and know that you’re all together. But if you’re bombing as a stand up comedian… OUCH!

Lou: Do you have any plans to bring Roxie 77 over to the UK in the near future?

Ryan Roxie: Yeah! Because of the extensive touring I did over the years with Alice, I always felt a very close relationship with the UK. We’ve had a lot of Sick Things people come and help promote Roxie 77. Si Haley, the CEO and the owner of Sick Things UK, has done such a great job with taking Roxie 77 under his wing. Anybody that wants to help out Roxie 77 – I think it’s a worthy band! It’s a band worth helping. I think we have a really good time when we play and a good message to put out to people… and when people see us, I think you always leave satisfied. I sound like a sex cream or something! [laughs] It sounds like some sort of lube!

Lou: Do you have any final thoughts for this interview?

Ryan Roxie: Well, you said that perhaps you’re gonna edit this down to 10 minutes… So my final thoughts are – good luck! And, if you do get one quote or one soundbite in, I want everyone to know that with Roxie 77 you are invited to come into our world, and be a part of our world. It’s not that we want you to like stay in the background and not become involved. We want you to become involved and I think we play music that invites you in. Whether it’s songs like “When You See God” that will hopefully make you think and get you involved in that respect, or there’s other songs like “Go It Alone” or “The Question” or “Choice” that will definitely make you shimmy and shake, move side to side, jump up and down, dance like a white guy or whatever you wanna do! We try to right songs for the waist down – “Give Me Some Groove” is a good example of that. But we want you to be involved, be part of the show and hopefully be part of our world and don’t be afraid to talk to us and get in touch with us. The best way is through Roxie77.com.

Lou: Excellent! Thanks for your time!

Ryan Roxie: Thank you so much for the interview. I wasn’t planning on talking so much, but that’s the problem when people don’t just ask me about my favourite colour. [laughs].. Or “tell us a crazy bus story” or “tell us a crazy road story”. I’m glad there was none of those questions because I really don’t have any crazy road stories or bus stories… and if I did I’d write a book and ruin a bunch of lives and I don’t wanna do that!

roxie77.com

This album has been sitting in my collection for a fair while and, to be honest, I’ve never really given it a proper listen. Luckily the new iPod has come to the rescue yet again and this morning I found myself giving it a spin (ok, I guess it doesn’t ‘spin’ on an iPod… [...]]]>

This album has been sitting in my collection for a fair while and, to be honest, I’ve never really given it a proper listen. Luckily the new iPod has come to the rescue yet again and this morning I found myself giving it a spin (ok, I guess it doesn’t ‘spin’ on an iPod… the files get ‘read’… but that doesn’t sound as cool, so I’m gonna stick with spin).

“Peace, Love and Armageddon” possibly isn’t the kind of album that I would have bought without a significant nudge in the right direction… (or for someone to just give it to me… which was the case in this instance). But, then I would have missed out.

This album is full of strong, laid-back rock tracks with a fantastic summer-vibe. It’s strange how some albums give me a summer vibe and some give me a winter vibe… Bizarre.

I’m going to ignore tradition and start by talking about the album’s closer “One More Day”. Why start at the end? Simply because I can. So there. I can’t help but want to sing along to this one – it’s insanely catchy… and I really like the lyrics:

“One more day I asked her, one more day to think things over, cos y’know things are getting better all the time, they couldn’t get much worse”

I like the way they’re positive… but in a bittersweet way.

“Second Chances” is a thought-provoking ballad, “Simple Plan” tells the story of getting older and “My Girlfriend” is a great mid-paced rocker… and it starts with a soundbite from “American Pie”.

Overall, this is a fantastic rock album and one that I’d highly recommend.

myspace.com/roxie77