JOHN CORABI In Montreal: Video Interview, Performance Footage Available

HardTimes.ca conducted an interview with John Corabi (MÖTLEY CRÜE, THE SCREAM, RATT, UNION, ESP) when he played at Petit Cafe Campus on August 3, 2010 with Tracii Guns' L.A. GUNS and FASTER PUSSYCAT. Watch the chat below.

In other news, Corabi was recently interviewed by Sweden's Metal Shrine. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Shrine: When you read around on the Internet and you talk to people, your album with MÖTLEY CRÜE always comes up as a favorite and it's one of my favorite CRÜE albums and a lot of people put it up there with the classic ones. It was too bad that it didn't go further.

Corabi: Well, you know. Everything happens for a reason and not everything happens the way it's supposed to happen. Maybe I'm delusional, but I still feel that my best years are ahead of me. I don't feel that I've musically have done the best music that I can do. We'll see what happens. I can tell you right now that this tour is the first real tour I've done on my own as a solo artist and it's been great. The response has been great. A lot of people are coming up "Dude, I'm so glad to see you doing this!" I'm really looking forward to going over to Europe. I think, once people get wind of the fact, it's gonna be really cool.

Metal Shrine: Did you audition for the CRÜE or did they know about you before?

Corabi: Yeah, they had my SCREAM record. We talked and they said they loved the SCREAM record. Nikki [Sixx] had mentioned it and he just called me and asked me if I could come down and jam with them. I went down on a Monday and on Tuesday they told me I was in the band. It was very quick.

Metal Shrine: Do you remember what songs you played when you were jamming?

Corabi: We did "Dr. Feelgood"… It's funny, we did "Jailhouse Rock" and we did "Smokin' In The Boys Room", "Helter Skelter"… We just kind of jammed together. Jammed some blues and I played guitar and Mick [Mars] and I traded off some solos and then we immediately started working on songs. The first two songs we worked on was "Hammered" and "Misunderstood", so that worked out OK, too.

Metal Shrine: What about this book of yours? I read somewhere that it was pretty much done?

Corabi: It was and then I got the first initial draft and I didn't like it. I went back and… you know, again, maybe I overthink everything, but my mark… maybe I set my bar or mark too high, but I wanna be like super-proud of whatever it is I write, whether it's music or a TV show or whatever and the bottom line of it is that I have a bar now after reading "The Dirt", which I thought was a great book, my book can't be any less than "The Dirt". I read my book and to be honest with you, I thought it sucked! The way it was written, I just thought it was fucking horrible! I scrapped it and I just started over. It is coming. I apologize to everybody who's been waiting for all of this stuff. Just are with me, it'll be worth it in the long run. I'm a little bit of a stickler for things.

Metal Shrine: As you said, if you do something you want to get it right.

Corabi: Yeah, if I wanna release something not as good as "The Dirt", I could release it right now, but ultimately I want a great book and I'm not gonna do it if it's not done right.

Metal Shrine: Are you doing it all by yourself or are you writing with someone?

Corabi: I'm actually having someone help me with it. What I'm doing is, I want to write my own chapters because at the end of the day no one's gonna get my sense of humor better than me, or my sarcasm or any of that stuff. I'm like "Let me write it!" and I'll send the chapters to my friend who's helping me finish it and then he'll fine-tune everything and make it proper.

Metal Shrine: Was there any reason for writing the book now and not in another five or ten years?

Corabi: It was just weird because I had gone through a couple o divorces, the stuff with the MÖTLEY guys and all this shit and one of my managers actually sat and told me, "Dude, you should write a book!" I thought about it and… I'm not like a typical rock guy. My story doesn't read like one of those VH1 "Behind The Music" thing, like musician is poor, gets together with three other poor musicians and they struggle and write songs, then they become huge and this massively famous band and then they do tons of drugs and the they argue with each other and then they fall apart and wither away and then they get back together again and conquer the earth. It's not my story! Things are a bit more complicated. Initially everybody said, "Oh, I hope this is a kiss-and-tell MÖTLEY book!" No, MÖTLEY, as great as MÖTLEY is only a small portion of my life and this is more about where I grew up, some of the things that happened when I was younger growing up in Philadelphia. It goes into detail about about where the song "Uncle Jack" came from and that person. Just crazy, crazy stuff in my life, but the whole time my music career was running parallel to all of this crazy shit that was going on in my life. I feel like, if anything, it's just a book that is no punches, no bullshit, it's not colored. This isn't about John Corabi sleeping with four models in Tokyo. I'm not sugarcoating anything. It's just, here's my life, here's where I came from, here's what I meant when I wrote this song and here's what was happening in my life. It's just really a very straight-forward honest thing! But I think it kind of gives people a perspective on having perseverance of you wanna do and enjoy doing. Win, lose or draw, whether you're making money or you're not making money. It's just about perseverance and believing in yourself. It's been a long time coming. I started it and each tour and each thing that I do is like another little story that's interwoven into it. I'm just gonna keep writing and at some point we'll sit down and edit it and figure it out. I'll let my buddy sit down and edit it and figure out where the beginning is and where the end is. Make sure that it just reads right. It's all good!

Read the entire interview from Metal Shrine.

Interview:

Performance: