RICHIE KOTZEN On 'Rewarding' Musical Partnership With ADRIAN SMITH: 'It's A Creative Conversation'

After their March 5 acoustic performance at Los Angeles's Grammy Museum, SMITH/KOTZEN principals Richie Kotzen and Adrian Smith were interviewed by FOZZY frontman and professional wrestler Chris Jericho. Some excerpts appear below.

On the origins of SMITH/KOTZEN:

Adrian: "I always feel weird saying this, but actually, my wife met Richie in a bar. It was perfectly innocent, Richie assures me. She was a fan of his music. I'd heard [his] album 'Mother's Head Family Reunion'. I thought it was fantastic, but it was quite a few years ago, and he'd sort of dropped off our radar. Then my wife said, 'Have you seen what Richie's doing lately?', and I checked it out. It was fantastic. I moved to L.A. part-time about 15 years ago, and almost 10 years ago, Richie and I became friends. We used to jam at my house — in a little room, we'd play BAD COMPANY, Stevie Ray [Vaughan], anything just for a laugh. And then my missus said, 'Why don't you guys write together?' I wouldn't have thought that – I mean, this guy does it all, but the combination is unusual. But it works. I'm happy to be involved in it. It's been very productive. We write very easily — the writing, it just flows. [We want to] keep this music alive."

On their shared influences:

Adrian: "In the early '70s, in my mid-teens, I was really open to this music I discovered — DEEP PURPLE, HUMBLE PIE, [and] later on, FREE, BAD COMPANY. That's music I grew up with, and it stays in your blood. It makes such an incredible impression on you when you're a kid — you hear it, and it just knocks you sideways. Having said that, Richie's got his own influences... but we take that basic sort of spirit, and then make it into a song that you can remember, not just a riff played over and over again. You try make a song out of it that's got some substance."

Richie: "I think that's what connects [us] — Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, HUMBLE PIE, FREE, BAD COMPANY, Paul Rodgers, early Rod Stewart. Personally, I kind of delve a little into the jazz/fusion world — I played with Stanley Clarke for a while, and I'm a big fan of that style. George Benson was my first concert I ever saw, and that floored me. To me, he's the greatest guitar player ever. Shortly after that, I saw Stevie Wonder… that had a big impact on me. Then on the other side of the coin, when I was very young, [I discovered] IRON MAIDEN… Every morning before school when I was little, 'Woe to you…' [the intro of 'The Number Of The Beast'] would echo throughout the house as I got dressed."

On whether it's unusual for Kotzen to share the spotlight with another guitarist:

Richie: "It's a nice departure. It's like, you take a break from yourself, and it's nice to kind of lay back and support someone singing. I come from the school as a musician that if there's vocals [and] if there's singing, everything is designed and built to support the singer, the vocal. That's the focal point. If there's no singer, if it's instrumental music, then everything is built and designed to support either the soloist or saxophone or whatever it is, or the melody. In this instance, I kind of adopt that philosophy — to support Adrian when he's singing [and] make sure whatever I'm doing complements what he's doing, and if he's going to take a solo, the key to it is to listen. A lot of times, what happens with a lot of rock musicians, they get on stage and figure, 'Well, I'm just gonna do me, and I'm going to just play all this shit that I learned how to play. I'm going to fit it in where I can,' and that's not real musical. We both listen to each other, [and] we respond as a conversation. It's a creative conversation, and it's very rewarding…

"I have a lot more experience playing in a trio. I'm very comfortable with it. The dynamic of the improvisation element is what attracts me to it, because it's easy for three guys to kind of play off of each other and create on the spot, so the music kind of reflects that. [SMITH/KOTZEN] is different, because in a sense there's more structure. [Adrian] and I work out a lot of things that we're going to play together and how we fit together. It's hard to compare and contrast, because it really is two different animals. It's two different hats. But I love what we're doing, so I don't want to compare one to the other. They're different – not better or worse, just different."

On how making SMITH/KOTZEN albums differs from making albums with IRON MAIDEN:

Adrian: "MAIDEN these days, we record live in the studio. We don't even rehearse – someone brings a song in; we play it a few times; and the producer goes, 'I think I've got that.' With Richie, we sit down, the two of us, in a room. There's no producer – there's nobody, just us. And we build the song from scratch, from a demo usually – and we just build it, and build it, and build it until that will turn into the master that you hear, but it started life as something on one of our hard drives. It's great – you can go at your own pace. I think for this [new] album, we wrote six songs two years ago, then we had a break because we were busy, and then we came back and said, 'Well, what do we need? We need a fast one; we need a ballad.' And then we just finished it off."

On whether they scaled down their expectations when launching a side project together:

Adrian: "I didn't really think beyond just doing it for the satisfaction of doing it, although as it sort of developed, I thought, 'Well, maybe this has got some legs.' I've done a lot of stuff in the past, and I just haven't really followed through with it as strongly as I should have, but this one, I was so pleased with it, I thought, 'You should go get this out there. I think people would enjoy it.'

Richie: "I don't really think very much beyond what I'm working on in that moment. When Adrian and I were writing together, I didn't have any kind of expectations beyond, like, 'Let's just finish the song that we're working on,' and once we had a collection of songs that we liked, it became, 'Wow, let's release it – let's make a record.' I don't really step outside myself and analyze too much, like, 'Oh, I'm playing for 200 people,' or, 'I'm playing for a thousand people,' or this or that – I do the music because I love making music, so that's the only real thing I focus on, and if there's a gig to be done, to make sure I'm prepared."

SMITH/KOTZEN's second album, "Black Light/White Noise", will be released via BMG on April 4.

Photo credit: Piper Ferguson