THE CURSED Guitarist Discusses Collaboration With OVERKILL Frontman

Mark Carras of Rock My Monkey recently conducted an interview with THE CURSED/ex-HADES guitarist Dan Lorenzo. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rock My Monkey: Beautiful. Now, THE CURSED had their live debut [in May]. How did it feel to get back onstage, and how long had it been since you had t played live?

Dan Lorenzo: It had been five years for me from doing a full show. We did this warm-up show at L'Amour back in April. We did six songs. And I was petrified to do that show. Then I got a call from Blitz. I was down in Dallas, and I called Blitz, and he's like, "Listen, I got us a show, May 20th, but we got to headline. We got to do over an hour's worth of music. Joey Belladonna is opening up for us." I was like, "Oh my god." I was literally shaking at six o'clock in the morning when I woke up the next day thinking about the show. Like I said, I hadn't played a full show in five years. The L'Amour reunion was a real good little taste of getting back into it. And even though I was petrified to do the show, as we did the show I realized, man, this is fun as hell. Like I said, I play basketball all summer long, and I love it. I'm totally into it. But right now I wish we had another THE CURSED show tomorrow night, because the show was great. It was just phenomenal. In every way it was great. And what was funny was the Highline Ballroom was the place we played and Paul McCartney just did a show there last week, totally unannounced show. He announced it the day before, I believe. So it was a beautiful venue and the show went great.

Rock My Monkey: Cool. What are the chances of THE CURSED doing any more shows, or even maybe a live DVD?

Dan Lorenzo: Well, I would love to. I really would. Right now is the longest I've gone without talking to Blitz since we started writing together. It's been about five days. I think he's finishing mixing the new OVERKILL CD. So a lot of THE CURSED, the next live show will be based on where the CD sells the best, where we're getting some radio spins, and working around OVERKILL's schedule.

Rock My Monkey: What would you say is the biggest difference between your main bands and THE CURSED stylistically?

Dan Lorenzo: My main band being my solo stuff?

Rock My Monkey: Well, your solo stuff, and of course Blitz has OVERKILL, and there's also I believe MURDER ONE.

Dan Lorenzo: Oh, okay. Alright. Well, THE CURSED probably sounds more like my solo CDs than anybody else's other bands. Mike Cristi has a band called YEARS OF STATIC which is sort of like a FOO FIGHTERS-type band. MURDER ONE went from being a punk band to almost a classic rock band. And OVERKILL is obviously known as being a thrash band, although they do throw some surprises at you every now and then. But yeah, I think THE CURSED to me sounds almost like NON FICTION with the guy singing bluesy. I mean, I think a lot of the songs on the cd, when they hear them they're not going to believe it was Blitz. In the song "Evil In The Bag", I say "one, two, three, four," and it sounds like Gene Simmons or Pete Koller from SICK OF IT ALL. But I am shocked at how Blitz sounds on some of these songs. I never knew he had this side in him really.

Rock My Monkey: Cool. Now being the self-professed "biggest OVERKILL fan boy on the planet" I got to say I've always heard a blues background hiding, a blues element hiding in the background on Blitz's voice.

Dan Lorenzo: Yeah, well, I think he probably grew up with some of that kind of music. He was telling me when he first wrote the lyrics and the melody lines of "Evil In The Bag", before he mailed it to me he's like it sounds like… Oh, who'd he say? Like Harry Connick Jr. And I toured with OVERKILL. NON FICTION opened up for OVERKILL like 55 times in 1993 in America and Europe, and I really didn't know he had this in him. And I was telling this story, I told it before, when Blitz first came to my house, which was in December of 2005, to show me what he wrote for the first three songs I gave him, as he was walking up the stairs to come into my house I was thinking to myself, what if I hate what he did? What if I just don't like it? How awkward and uncomfortable would that be? This guy's my buddy. That would suck! And as soon as I heard what he did to the first song, I think it was "All's Right", I was like, "Man, this is perfect." This guy gets it. He understands where the vocals should go. And he's gone for something different, and it was thrilling to me.

Rock My Monkey: Would you say this is a one-off thing? Or are we going to hear from the band in future? Or is it just up in the air?

Dan Lorenzo: Well, now I got to threaten everybody, Mark. If they download songs for free, or dub copies for their friends, this is a one time thing. If they go out and buy this cd and support the band, we would love to do a second follow-up CD.

Rock My Monkey: THE CURSED is a rather good name, but have you had any contact, anyone contact you from another band with the same name? It sounds like, it's a name that sounds like it would already be taken.

Dan Lorenzo: Yeah, I think there's a band called CURSED. I think they're either from Canada or from Los Angeles, and I think they're so a DYI band that nobody's contacted us. But when Blitz first said the name, I'm like, "Man, that's too good. Somebody must have used that." And we Googled it, and we couldn't find anything. And then afterwards somebody told us there's a band called CURSED. But one of the hardest things to do is to think of a new band name. I was combining two adjectives together and I would Google it, and there'd be some band in Ohio with that name. It was crazy. It's so hard. But right now nobody's contacted us, so I guess we're in the clear, because if you Google "The Cursed" in Myspace, we're the only thing that comes up, and if you Google "The Cursed," we're the number one entry, our web site.

Check out the entire interview in text and audio format at this location.