GREAT WHITE's MICHAEL LARDIE Says JACK RUSSELL Is Still 'Recovering'

Dan Chesnet of Belgrade News recently conducted an interview with GREAT WHITE guitarist/keyboardist Michael Lardie. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Belgrade News: Your lead vocalist (Jack Russell) is out right now [after undergoing emergency surgery for a perforated bowel]. How is he doing and when do you guys expect him to be back with the band?

Lardie: He is recovering. Any time you have your midsection cut into they had to reach a section of his large intestine any time you open up your body that far, it takes quite a while to rehab the body to reanimate the nerves and all the muscles and stuff. As far as a projected date, it's really more often than not up to Jack. I hear, and I've talked to him a couple or three times a week, he's working, very, very hard to get back. He misses it terribly. He misses all of us. And we'd like him to come back when he's 150 percent ready, if you follow my line of thinking. Because I'd hate for him to come back too soon and realize, "Oh, wow, I really should have done rehab for another month before I tried to come back. Now I gotta take more time off." I want him to be just so ready to go that he just blows people's minds. So we're all being very supportive of him. And the great thing is he's being very supportive of our scenario by endorsing us to go out and do what we're doing. And giving Terry Ilous [XYZ], who's filling in for Jack, encouragement. He calls him a couple a times a month, and says, "I'm hearing great things about you, thanks for singing my songs so well." We're having a great time with Terry, so it's a win-win situation. By like I said, I will reiterate, I don't want him coming back to soon. I want it to be right, so when he's back he's back all the way.

Belgrade News: How's the fan reception been with Terry at vocals?

Lardie: At first it's always like, ya know say the guy got a divorce and everyone loved his wife. They see the new girlfriend and they're like, (Lardie hums),automatically they're going to go, yeah I don't know. But after they hear him sing a couple of songs, they're like, "Holy crap!" Because Terry's such a terrific vocalist. And he is doing the songs; he's paying homage to the songs very nicely where he's copying a perfect amount of anality but also still putting his personality into it. So I would not want him to be a carbon copy of Jack because nobody can really be Jack just like nobody can really be Steve Perry from JOURNEY. The guys that they have do a pretty good job of doing the Steve Perry thing, but I like it better that Terry not try to be Jack. He's trying to pay homage to doing the songs greatly, but at the same time putting on enough of his own artistry into it. The fan response by the end of the show is like, wow, you guys picked the right guy. You can't do any better than that.

Belgrade News: Are there any songs that you shy away from with Terry or can he jump in and pretty much do anything?

Lardie: He can pretty much do anything. We've dusted a couple off that we haven't done in a while. We're doing "Lady Red Light" again and he rips up "Save Your Love". He does a great job on that. We're doing "Big Goodbye", which we haven't done in a year. So it's fresh for us too to be able to put in some of these songs we haven't done in a while. Not that Jack couldn't do them. It's just that when you do them you write them and you sing them for so many years it's not that particularly fresh to you like some songs are. Because it's a fresh thing with Terry right now he can look at these songs and they seem fresh to him. So there again it feels fresh to us.

Belgrade News: So with Jack not there right now, I assume the band's not working on anything new.

Lardie: We always write songs because that's what we do. And we always think in terms of how it would sound with Jack singing them. Mark [Kendall, guitar] and I have created music and melody for these songs over the years. Kind of like in your mind when you're at home working on a song going, "Where would Jack go with this. How would he approach this." We keep doing it no matter if we have a project specifically in mind or not. So when we do get to that point where we're doing another record we have a wealth of catalog to be able to draw from. And hopefully have 10 or 11 really good songs on it out of 100 ideas.

Read the entire interview from Belgrade News.