TROUBLE Guitarist Discusses Forthcoming Album

Laura Wiebe Taylor of Hellbound recently conducted an in-depth interview with guitarist Bruce Franklin of legendary Chicago doom metallers TROUBLE. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

On TROUBLE's "Live in Los Angeles" album, recorded with new vocalist Kory Clarke (WARRIOR SOUL) in the summer of 2008:

"It wasn't a big ordeal to record, which made it more feasible for us to do. Our sound man basically recorded just the one show on the tour so it wasn't like a big costly thing. We didn't actually have the plan of releasing a live album but once we listened to the recording of the show, we thought that would be a good idea — to introduce people to Kory, and in the meantime give us a little time to gel with him and write stuff for a new record."

On TROUBLE's 30th aniversary (the band formed in 1979):

"Now that Rick Wartell [guitar] and myself are the only original members left, I guess we didn't make a big deal out of it. If we had most everybody still in the band we may have done a big deal about it. We kind of just acknowledged it ourselves and publicly didn't say much about it."

On TROUBLE's newest member, drummer Marko Lira:

"Marko was playing in Rick's side band, WET ANIMAL, and actually our drummer [Jeff Olson] kind of quit suddenly on us. Well, he had given notice that he was going to leave but we had two festivals to play in Europe and then he backed out of them at the last minute, I mean, literally like two weeks before the festivals. We had to find somebody fast, and there really wasn't time to audition people, so Marko was the first person we tried to fill in so we could not bail on those festivals. And then it ended up becoming a more permanent thing. It's been over a year now, so he's had time to gel."

On working with singer Kory Clarke:

"Kory has been at least a year and a half with us now. Over time like that, people kind of find their comfort zone in the band and realize what the band's all about and kind of find their niche.

"Rick had seen Kory playing with his last band that he was in, DIRTY RIG, a few years back, and when it came time that we were going to be trying to replace Eric [Wagner], he brought that up to me about Kory and said, 'What do you say we give him a call?' and I was like, 'Sure.' And I guess Kory thought about it for a bit and decided it wasn't a bad idea, and he tried it out and it seemed to kind of work on some level.

"We've heard some people ask, 'Why did you pick Kory Clarke?' because he's not a doom metal singer or he doesn't sound anything like Eric, but we weren't particularly looking for someone to sound just like Eric, and we weren't necessarily looking for someone who was just a doom metal singer either. And we were thinking that maybe we could branch out and do something — a few little twists of things that maybe we've never done before with it, with a kind of vocalist like this. The way I describe it is a cross between the singer from NAZARETH and the first IRON MAIDEN singer Paul Di'Anno — it's a blend of those two voices, I mean, for the sound of his voice. Of course, he has his own style in the way he sings. I suppose maybe it's not for everyone, especially people that expected somebody who sounds just like Eric because he certainly doesn't sound like Eric. But he grew up listening to the same kind of stuff we did, and we thought maybe we could do something pretty cool, you know, doing a new record and seeing what might happen with that."

On TROUBLE's as-yet-untitled new album, Clarke's debut with the band:

"We have all the music basically written — the bare skeletons of the music are pretty much done — but we need to finish getting together with Kory and working on some of this. So we'll see."

"There's some stuff like some of the first album — 'Psalm 9' album stuff — and then there's some of the heavy groove stuff, like in the more recent years we've done, and there might be a couple songs that sound even maybe a little bit different than stuff we've done. I don't mean radically different — it's still gonna sound like TROUBLE. It isn't like we've written a couple of songs that don't sound anything like TROUBLE. Maybe it's because with Kory singing it sounds a little different. I think it's going to be a good mix. It's definitely going to have some pretty heavy stuff. It's not the more commercial side of TROUBLE.

"In the early days I'd probably write a lot of the music and there'd be a few songs we'd write together as a band in some cases. Then, in '90s-era TROUBLE we would have that same aspect and then Eric might have an acoustic song and then that we would take and kind of embellish it and make it more of a song as a band, and that was some stuff we started doing later on. As for this record, this may be the most songs that Rick's ever had of his on an album — basically Rick's written about half and I've written about half of what's gonna be the new record. So it will be different in that respect."

Read the entire in-depth interview at Hellbound.

Berlin, Germany's PitCam Production and More-Metal.com have posted professionally filmed, multi-camera video footage of Chicago doomsters TROUBLE performing the brand new track "Hunters Of Doom", from the group's forthcoming CD, on November 30, 2009 at the Magnet club in Berlin. Watch the clip below.