One can never have too much of ANNIHILATOR. The band released fifteen albums, its concert activity is absolutely congruent to the studio intensity and it's easy to see the unsinkable Jeff Waters' creation at least once in a couple of years. The same is with the interviews. One hour long conversation is surely not enough, because Jeff chooses almost on his own what to speak about and does it rather fascinatingly and in detail. Proofs below.
There are very different albums in your discography, but the last ones, three or four, sound a little bit similar, with some experimental songs of course, but still in one style. Have you found your sound?
Not really. I guess, as you said, maybe from 2010 onwards, the records we put out did sound kinda similar, it’s very hard and difficult, when you’re almost the only songwriter to keep writing great or classical songs, sometimes it’s ups and downs for musicians. Like JUDAS PRIEST or MAIDEN, I have all of their CDs, but there are some CDs that are better than other ones to me. It’s the same with ANNIHILATOR, you try to make a great CD everytime, but you know that’s not gonna happen. As for styles, I have a lot of different types of music that I play with ANNIHILATOR, there are different things I like: from pop to thrash, punk, death metal, classic heavy metal, there’s so many good styles of music. I think it’s been like we set on cruise control, the last three-four ANNIHILATOR CDs have done very well, so each one sell more than the previous one, so it’s easy to start thinking “OK, people like what we’re doing” and it’s easy to do the same thing again. And this time, on the new record that I’m working on now, I’m trying to do something different again, I’m trying to go back. Like a lot of fans in the different parts of Europe, South America, different parts of the world like us for our thrash roots, some people like us for the melodic, sort of more commercial metal kind of thing and fun songs, but I think, on the next one I really wanna go, I’d say to the thrash roots, more to the early ANNIHILATOR style. To change it up, because otherwise, like you said, you could probably put out another CD in the same sort of thing. I gotta take a chance and try something different. The good thing for me is that usually when I make changes or try different things, usually it’s what I like. Even if it’s not so good to some people, I’m happy with it. This time I’ve been inspired a lot by a lot of good concerts, I saw SLAYER, ANTHRAX and DEATH ANGEL last month in Montreal, Canada, and wherever I go on tour and play festivals with TESTAMENT, or EXODUS, or DESTRUCTION, or KREATOR, any of this bands, it brings me back to when I was a teenager and my favorite records were “Pleasure To Kill” or DESTRUCTION song “Bestial Invasion”. We played two shows with Canadian band RAZOR a little while ago and that was really inspirational for me. So it’s very easy to start turning towards the early thrash stuff. I’m gonna give it a try. When I’m going to my studio to write now I’m turning the gear out louder than normal and I’m playing really cool thrash kind of style thing. We’ll see what happens.
You had a crowdfunding campaign going, raising money for the DVD. You were even ready to sell your car for it! That's impressive. Or do you just have several cars?
Yeah, I’ve got a few, but with the car thing I was trying to get some attention to the crowdfunding thing, to raise some money, like you said, for the DVD, which is just finishing now, it’s being put together and edited by the record company’s staff, and it’s a really cool package. But it was also to help us on tour, with some equipment and the whole bunch of things that we had to do and I thought “OK, well, if somebody wants to pay a lot of money for my car, my Camaro, that’s great and maybe that would create a lot of attention to the crowdfunding” (laughs). It didn’t really create a lot of attention, a lot of people would say “Oh, he must have no money” or “Something’s wrong, you’re to get the rid of this car”, really I was trying just to get some attention for the crowdfunding. You know, nobody bought it, but I think it’s a kinda little bit of attention and kinda help. Looking back, the car was priced at the high end of what it’s worth, so if someone bought it, it would be the same thing as if I sold it privately. So I didn’t create as much attention as I thought I would, sometimes it was bad attention. People think and write away online “Maybe you selling it because everything is going bad”, but it wasn’t that. I think a lot of people know it’s very difficult for all bands to keep going and to put out the packages and the DVDs, to tour and to keep the band together. It’s not easy like it was fifteen years ago and more. There was a lot of money in the music business for heavy metal and that stopped. So you have to be smart, you have to think of different ideas to raise money and to keep going. But nobody got the car, I still have it (laughs).
Probably, there can’t be metal without struggle?
Yeah. I mean I don’t struggle financially, my struggle is mostly for trying to keep promoters, tour agents and people interested. Because there’s so much competition, there’s so many other bands that want to play on festivals, so you really have to work hard to try to promote yourself and your band and talk to all the festival promoters. It’s a struggle to keep it going, keep record companies, publishing companies and fans. If your music isn’t so good you have no chance. That’s why after a Europe tour that we start in a few weeks, I come back here to Canada and I’m gonna spend four months of just playing metal music in the studio. So I’m gonna get back to the number one thing I should concentrate on. It’s very easy to get distracted and to do the record quickly and that’s not a good thing.
What are the results of this campaign? Am I right, you couldn't reach the goal, but still it was helpful?
The goal number on this crowdfunding site was so huge that nobody would ever get there. No matter whether was one dollar or ten thousand euro, we’ll be able to use that towards what we need, which is the DVD or touring or all the other things we’ve done. So anything helped. Honestly, if it was one hundred dollars, that would have helped. Nobody ever thought we would get that goal, but the way that site, Indiegogo set up, it’s different than other sites. If you don’t reach the goal, you still can use the money that you’ve raised, but of course we do things to the fans on the campaign, we do little live concerts in a couple of weeks, we gave a lot of packages away and cool things to fans. Nobody is complaining, it’s just to some people online it looked like we were broke and had no money and we were desperate or something. No, it worked really good for us.
This DVD, will it be a continuation of “Ten years in hell”? There was a documentary that should be continued and cover the rest of ANNIHILATOR history I think.
This one was different. I saw one of them for the first time today. We’re doing three separate DVDs, one is a life concert in Germany at the Bang Your Head Festival, one that I’m mostly excited about is where we did a live acoustic set with three band members from ANNIHILATOR and two session studio musicians. We did a live acoustic show in my studio and filmed that only for maybe cameras and good sound, but it all was live and real, no fixing up and no overdubs, it’s about forty five minutes of songs from the past done acoustically and I had to do it once in my life, once in my career, just to do one acoustic record or DVD. I think we have a lot of melodic songs, commercial ballads or instrumentals. I had to get them in a system and just to do it once in my life. I’m really proud of it, when you’ll see how it turned out, nobody’s gonna believe it’s from a band called ANNIHILATOR (laughs). It’s not like that at all. And the third DVD is not a big boring documentary, it’s just an hour of life at the time that we shot the acoustic thing, that was for May and June 2016, so it’s not like history. There’s some history in there, but maybe only five percent, it’s more like life today. Here’s my studio, my house, my friends, this is how we’re working on the studio, this is interviews with the band members, some former people and I’m just talking about the summer, about the things happening now, so I didn’t go back and talk about “Suicide Society” and Jeff Waters and blah-blah-blah and the former line-ups. It was really just about this summer, getting together to do all of this and to get ready to the festivals and a lot of things.
Was it you who sang on this acoustic set?
On acoustic DVD we did it I think technically all five people sang. One of the session studio guys plays very simple percussion like bongos and shakers, very simple stuff. I got him because he’s a very famous singer in Canada who has played on a lot of big metal records in 80s. He’s an older guy, he’s sixty years old, he’s a drummer for Canadian band called BTO – BACHMAN-TURNER OVERDRIVE and he’s also been a session singer on many big sort of metal records from MOTLEY CRUE to SCORPIONS, from BON JOVI to heavy stuff. He’s in there with me singing, I gave him maybe four songs to sing the lead vocals, I sing the rest, some we both do together and we have three voices as back vocals. Our bassist Rich and guitar player Aaron and a session guitar player named Pat – they all sing. That’s a very cool thing, and thrash only fans – this is not for them, but this is kinda very interesting, it’s almost history of ANNIHILATOR in the music without talking about it.
That’s not really new for you. Sometimes ANNIHILATOR in general wasn’t a band for thrash only fans, with the songs like “Phoenix Rising” and so on.
Yeah. We have three types of fans. The ones who like just the heavier and thrashier records, those are the things like “Criteria For A Black Widow”, “Schizo Deluxe”, “Alice In Hell”. And we’ve got fans who like more traditional melodic heavy metal, albums like “King Of The Kill”, “Set The World On Fire”, “Carnival Diablos”, things like that. There’s a lot of different styles. And we have fans that like only one style and some that like us because we have different styles. So the one good thing for ANNIHILATOR I think is if you’re a fan of one ANNIHILATOR CD maybe you don’t like the next one, because it might be different. But sometime you may come back and listen may be in three or five years and say “Hey, I like this one”. We don’t have a lot of fans who like all our records, we have fans who like three, four or five. If I ask anyone in the world when I travel, I do it for twenty-thirty years, in the last five years I like to ask people what is your favorite ANNIHILATOR CD and everybody says things like “Oh, for sure it’s “Never, Neverland” and then other people say “No no no, “Set The World On Fire”, some will say “No, it’s “King Of The Kill”, and then some will go “Alice In Hell” was the best CD”. So we have four CDs that different countries like better than others. If you go to Germany “Alice In Hell” is not the number one CD – it’s “Never, Neverland”. If you go to Japan it’s “Set The World On Fire” and “King Of The Kill”. It changes in every country and it’s very interesting to see different opinions.
If you wanna know my opinion…
Yeah!
…my favorite album is “Waking The Fury”.
Oh, wow! That’s cool.
Moreover, this is my favorite album of all time, not only from ANNIHILATOR. I’ve got a couple of questions about it, but I guess we’ll return to them a little bit later.
No, I wanna talk about it! That was a cool record with Randy Black, some of the best drumming ever was on this record, and Joe Comeau singing. I had a very very annoying “Line 6” digital guitar sound there, but it was very evil and thrashy record, I think.
By the way, I have never met the information, why Joe Comeau left the band.
He was with us for “Carnival Diablos” in 2001, “Waking The Fury” in 2002, and then we did “Double Live Annihilation”, a live record with him. And I think what happened was basically there was an issue with “Double Live Annihilation” CD. When we did that, recorded it, I had put some photos out to the record company in Germany called AFM Records. I sent them band photographs to put in the booklet and he was very unhappy with the photo. The strangest reasons can cause big problems. He didn’t like the photo that I sent them, so he got a lawyer and sent a letter to me saying we’re not allowed to release the album with that photograph on it. For me that meant the end. Because if I can’t put a photograph of one of my band members on the CD, if I have to get approval for the good photograph, you can’t stop a record company or a record release because of a photo. That wasn’t one of those times when some members have to leave because of the family or because they have a job that makes lots of money, or they get tired of touring, or there’s problem with alcohol or drugs, or they don’t get along with somebody in the band. There’s always a good reason to leave. That was one of those times in ANNIHILATOR when the reason was so stupid. And that sucked because when we did “Carnival Diablos” record with Joe Comeau, I knew he was like Bruce Dickinson or Rob Halford, a real hundred percent old school heavy metal eighties singer. I thought he was a perfect singer for the band and when we did “Waking The Fury” with Randy Black on drums I thought I found the perfect combination for ANNIHILATOR. And then to have it end because of one stupid photograph on a live CD… You know, fans just don’t understand sometimes that the littlest things or normal things can break up the relationship between a musician and a band. So that sucked, I hoped I would stay with Joe for quite a long time, but it didn’t work. But I talk to him now on e-mails or Facebook over the years, he’s doing pretty good with this music, working as a crew member for some bands, so he’s still alright, but we don’t talk very much.
It seems, that the main cause why people have to leave the music is family (you may argue with it if you want). But you seem to be a responsible parent. Why some can combine band and family and the others can't?
Well, you know, if I write most of the songs, technically it's my band. I pay the musicians a salary, I pay them money. Let’s say the bands like OVERKILL or TESTAMENT, a lot of bands do the same thing to survive. The main guys in the band, the core guys hire the other musicians to tour and that’s a lot of what goes on, even in some of big bands that’s how it works. Sometimes when things are not going well, like for us from the year 1997 to 2007, those ten years were very difficult to survive and there was almost no money coming from the music, so I couldn’t really afford to pay people as much money. So when the money goes down, then people have to care of themselves or their families. They go to another band or another job that makes better money and it’s good and fun for a couple of years to play in a band and on a CD and to tour, but after few years of this if you’re not getting paid very much money then most people find something better, a better job or a bigger paying band, or they just leave and start their own business or their own bands. In my case, because I write everything and do most of it, when it’s not going well I’m the one that loses money and pass issues problems. When it goes well, I make most of the money. So you could see why people would leave. If it’s not going well, I can’t afford pay them as much and they leave. If it’s going very well then you don’t have as much problems keeping the same members. And then you have another problem, if it’s going well a lot of musicians would say “I want more, I want more, I want more” and that could be a problem too, right? It’s just human nature. But yeah, family’s probably one of the most biggest reasons, but from my experience family is sort of subcategory. Financially it’s important, because if you care about family you need to have money, so family is a part of financial thing. But for me and my experience most of it has been alcohol and drugs. That’s really what I’ve seen for thirty years, not just in my band, but in many other bands. I would say that more than fifty percent of musicians that I worked with in my band and seen in other bands, alcohol and drugs were the problem for them. You can’t get along with somebody who’s always drunk or on drugs, you can’t work with those people for very long. And that was the same way when I was younger. I never drink in a day time or before the show or during the show, but after the show I would start drinking more than twelve beers every night and that’s was on for many many years. That’s why I had to stop. And I wasn’t easy to work with when I was like that too. So alcohol and drugs problems are also very important, as financial and family problems. If you wanna get into a touring band and you have a family at home, you really need to decide if this is the life you want. Because there’s a lot of things you can do at home with music. You can work in your city in the studio. But mainly it’s money and alcohol. Ego is in there too, you have to remember it. I have met some people whom the money is not important and the music is a little bit important, but being complemented and being famous or having people say “Oh you’re so great, you’re so great” that’s a problem too (laughs). That’s life, that’s the same way with everybody in their jobs or in their families. We all have our problems and issues, it’s the same with the music business.
I know that in the nineties ANNIHILATOR had a reputation of a “sober” band. Is it the same now, or you became more tolerant?
I’ll just give you a quick example. I never have a problem with anybody drinking alcohol, the only thing I have a problem with it’s illegal drugs in a bus, dressing room or the airport, when it’s near me, my band or my crew. But I know some of us in our band or crew like to smoke pot once in awhile and I have no problem with that. And in the bus the guys don’t get drunk every night. But when it’s before the day off then everybody goes crazy and drinks and has a good time. After the show they may have one or two beers or something. But my guys are pretty smart, they know when they get into this band that you can have beer after the show, rum and coke, or vodka, or whatever you want. But if you’re playing shitty, you need to work, you better keep that away for awhile until you get your job done. I have a lot of fun the night before the day off because that’s when I get to watch a lot of people to get drunk, and I’m not. So I get to watch everybody change and have fun, and be silly. It doesn’t bother me. I haven’t had drink a since December 31st 1999. It’s been a long time. It doesn’t bother me at all. My fiancée likes wine, my band members like to drink. Actually I think I found a guy in my band named Richard Hinks, he’s from the UK. He’s been with us not very long, I guess for almost a year, I can’t remember, and he doesn’t drink. I was quite shocked and amazed because somebody besides me doesn’t drink alcohol. It doesn’t affect anything, writing and stuff because there’s lots of things to get angry about when you’re writing (laughs). There’s lots of things in life to write about.
You know, I looked in the metal-archives and counted the musicians that played in ANNIHILATOR. Thirty of them - not including those who occasionally played live with you. Do you even remember all of them?
I think we're up to fourty one (laughs). I think if you look how ANNIHILATOR started out, I tried to make it a band, but after we finished our demo cassette tape, couple of guys left already, and by the time we did our first album I probably worked with eight musicians in ANNIHILATOR. Before “Alice In Hell” came out. So very early I realized, you know, that if the bass player don’t want to show up at the rehearsal because he wanted to go to a club with a girlfriend, see a band, have fun and party, I stayed home and I learned how to play bass, how to write the bass parts. I was 100% focused on music. Girls, booze, parties, going out and stuff, that was not even in my brain. I wanted to make music and be in a band. And I knew if I did well at that maybe then I can go partying and hang out with girls. But I wanted to work first, and most of the people, when they’re young, they don’t have that kind of drive, they just want go party and have fun. I took it very seriously, so it was hard to find musicians and I decided very early to hire musicians. If I need a drummer for the studio, I’ll pay him couple of thousand dollars and he plays drums on the CD. If you wanna come on tour, here’s a thousand bucks a week, you can play drums for us on tour, or I can find another drummer and pay him. So that’s how it started, same with the bass player, same with the second guitar player. After a couple of tours and albums I just hire people. Strange, but that’s how it was. So it’s like a solo project and a band.
That was the very moment, when you realized, that you’re doomed…
Yeah. I mean, doomed as in I won’t have that band that I always wanted, which was like (speaks enthusiastically) Lombardo, Araya, Hanneman and King. As I went on I started noticing things, I realized that there were the bands like EXODUS, OVERKILL, TESTAMENT and they all do the same thing. In the nineties or past the nineties, like 2000-2002. Those bands I mentioned they went through ten-twenty musicians, if you look at their histories. They did the same thing because the times were very difficult for awhile. Bands lost the musicians, musicians would leave and go to other jobs and other things. So bands like TESTAMENT, OVERKILL, ANNIHILATOR, EXODUS, we change members all the time, but it was because we had to do it to survive. The bigger bands – you remember what happened with IRON MAIDEN, they went to Blaze Bayley and JUDAS PRIEST went to Ripper Owens. In North America, in Canada and the United States JUDAS PRIEST would play big arenas and all the sudden in 1994 they went playing big clubs. And IRON MAIDEN was playing smaller venues with Blaze Bayley. And it was difficult times, but you had to do it to survive in the shitty times. But in my case it started right in the beginning. Almost in the beginning I knew I was going to play bass on all the CDs. Which I did. Couple of months ago I figured out that of the 160 songs we’ve done in the studio, I played bass on 158 (laughs). All of them except two songs I played the bass guitar. And I played the guitar on most of all those, written most of the songs. Right in the beginning it was more like a solo project too.
Maybe these two songs were some acoustic pieces or instrumental intros without bass at all?
Nope (laughs). Bass on all of them. But the other thing too is like I wasn’t like TESTAMENT, OVERKILL and EXODUS. They would get new members because they had to. They had to do it because they would lose someone when it wasn’t working out and they had to continue. So they hired someone else. In my case a lot of times I would make a CD and I would hire a different drummer to go on tour. Sometimes it wasn’t because of family, drugs, money, alcohol, ego or anything. Sometimes it’s like “Well, I like this drummer in studio, but I wanna that drummer on tour”. There you go, that’s a long answer!
Беседовал: Борис Игонин
Фотографии: с официального сайта группы, а так же с московских концертов Annihilator авторства Александра Хорошилова
Выражаем благодарность DELTA MEKONG CONCERTS и лично Олегу Коленде за организацию интервью.
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