Whether you call it hard rock, heavy metal, cock rock, hair metal, melodic rock, pop-metal, AOR, glam or sleaze, this is the place to find out what became of your favorite 80's rock bands.
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Whether you call it hard rock, heavy metal, cock rock, hair metal, melodic rock, pop-metal, AOR, glam or sleaze, this is the place to find out what became of your favorite 80's rock bands. |
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BANG TANGO: CRAZY NIGHTS: Metal Forces Magazine, July/August 1989 By Adam St.James ADAM ST.JAMES TALKS TO VOCALIST JOE LESTE ABOUT THE HUGE HYPE SURROUNDING L.A. BASED BANG TANGO With the release of their debut live EP "Live Injection" on World Of Hurt Records, and the subsequent full length album "Psycho Cafe" on MCA, I BANG TANGO have unleashed themselves with a fury on the eyes and ears of the world. To many, BANG TANGO seems to be another 'overnight sensation', although most of us probably know better. The record industry ain't exactly Fantasyland, and this hot new LP group would be the first to tell you. Everybody in the group has paid their dues, in numerous bands, and in sweaty, smoky clubs in LA'S controversial pay-to-play environment, where most bands are forced to pay to get up on stage and help the club sell drinks. The band was signed to MCA/Mechanic Records last year, after running rampant on the club circuit, in their own way, going around the sharks who pass as promoters. As summer nears, drummer Tigg Ketler, bassist Kyle Kyle, guitarists Mark Knight and Kyle Stevens, and vocalist Joe Leste are trying to get a handle on their sudden thrust into the worldwide rock'n'roll spotlight Joe, what is BANG TANGO all about? "Our attitude is that we truly believe you don't have to... if you met any of the guys in the band, you'd be friends with 'em in like five minutes and it'd be just like somebody you've known all your life. Nobody is a head case in this band. Nobody feels like 'hey man, you gotta go out,' and 'hey man, I'm doin' this interview.' You know. Nobody does drugs. We aren't saying 'hey man, we're drunk all the time,' and 'we get boned all the time', we're not all about that our attitude is that you don't have to be a fuckin' stuck up asshole to get out there and play raunchy hard rock and roll and do it good. We want to be able to have people see us on stage and say 'these guys are hot', and then we get off stage and we're just like everybody else. Normal, nice guys. On the music side, we want our music to be like some guy and girl walk into a club, and the guy is gonna sit there and go 'fuck yeah!' and just feel like he's the coolest thing around, and the chick is gonna feel like the sexiest thing around, just by hearing our music. So we're not just appealing to 13 or 14 year old little girls." What about image. Your clothing and that kind of staff, does that make a big difference to you? "Not really. Not at all. Our band doesn't sit there and all try to get matching cowboy boots. We don't really think about it all that much." In the past you have had some GUNS N'ROSES comparisons, do you feel that's justified? "Not really. I've never seen GN'R play live, as weird as that may seem. The thing is that I'm like the same as Axl Rose, and how can you not...our band and their band are the same age group, so we all grew up on the same influences. I was into HANOI ROCKS, and all kinds of things. You get compared to something just because you're influenced by the same bands. I think it took a big left turn with our album." The last time I talked to you, you explained that you had gotten your name one day when you were walking down the street from work? "I just picked the two different names. I wanted to get something that went with our music. Really, "Bang" is a heavy sound, you see "Bang" and you think "heavy". "Tango" is a lighter, modem, groove, dance side. I put the two together and threw it at my band, and they liked it" You had told me about two billboards... "Yeah, actually on one side it said "put a band into your life" or something like that, and on the other side of that same billboard, when I was going home from work later that same day, it said something "Tango", and so I put the two together and I thought it went with our music pretty well, so we used it." So how did the band actually come together? "I was in a band with Tigg in San Diego, and then I came up to LA and tried out with ROUGH CUTT, and it wasn't what I wanted to do, it was too heavy metal, so I went back down to San Diego. After I was back in San Diego for a while, Amir from ROUGH CUT told a couple of guitar players about me, so they asked me to come up, and I figured if I liked it I'd go for it So I came up here and they were exactly what I was into, so I came up and we had another drummer, and then eventually Tigg came up and joined us, and it just fell together. The two guitar players are from the Calabasas area (a short way north of LA), and the bass player is from New York. It's just worked out perfect" I know that you used to sing at a club in Tijuana, Mexico... "Ah!! Ha! Ha! Mike's Bar! That was a couple of years ago. On Wednesday nights, everybody from San Diego would go down there, especially the people who weren't old enough to drink in California. There was a band down there at the bar, and they had a great singer, but nobody could understand him, so they wanted an American singer, so I tried out and got the gig. I would do just a bunch of BILLY IDOL, VAN HALEN, U2 and OZZY OSBOURNE covers. We'd just do anything. I played two sets a night and they paid me $75. So I'd just go down there on Wednesday nights and that was how I made money at the time. It was like a big beach party, there'd be massive fights and everything. That was when Tigg and I had an apartment, before BANG TANGO." So exactly when did BANG TANGO get started? "Right around October of 1987. We got it together and we played our asses off. In ten months we played 72 shows. We played anywhere and everywhere. We played small clubs. We played the Cocoanut Teaszer a lot, we played the Whisky all the time, we played Gazzarri's all the time, some in Orange County, down in San Diego. We played our asses off. Sometimes we played four or five shows in one week! We never had any money to advertise or do flyers, we just went out and played all the time. We got a record deal without even having a demo tape." How did you get around the pay-to-play situation that is all over Los Angeles? "When we first came out we paid to play our first show, but I'm from San Diego, and I never paid to play there in my life, so I wasn't about to do it here. My band was saying 'Well, things are different up here' and I said 'Fuck that, these people are getting our entertainment.' And these shister people up here, we told them 'Look, we're just not gonna pay to play, and if you don't like it, then don't have us play.' So they didn't have us play the first month, then we went to like the Whisky and we' d play there on a Tuesday night or something, and just play again on another Tuesday night, and just play anywhere and everywhere, and before you know it, they were calling us and saying 'Will you play? I'll give you the third slot and you don't have to pay,' and before you knew it we had tamed the tables, and we were in demand like five months later. We just played our asses off until it was a mandatory thing that these people had to call us up, and pay us. My advice to bands is to just get out there, and don't ever, ever pay, even when somebody tells you 'we need you to sell this many tickets,' just say 'I'm sorry, then I guess we're not going to be able to play', and they'll just say 'OK' and then you just go on to the next person until you find somebody that says, 'Well, you can play here.' The next thing you know, you'll be playing, and if the band's good enough the people are gonna want to see it. We didn't go around passing out flyers, we never passed out flyers, I couldn't do that." So how did you promote the band? "I don't know, you tell me? I have no idea? We just would play a show, and once in a while we'd take an ad out in a local fanzine or something. We just went for it, and played a lot I have no idea how the band got promoted like it did. We didn't have a huge following. We got signed after a show at Gazzarri's. There were four record labels there, and it was completely sold out. To this day I'm wondering where the hell all those people came from." How do you feel about the way the band has taken off? "We're all just completely freaked out!" Did you have management before you got signed? "No. I managed the band. Every single day I spent like five hours on the phone, calling people, just calling all the time. Then we got hooked up with a killer lawyer, our lawyer is just fantastic. I'd call up clubs and I'd call up management companies, and agents and booking agencies, everybody you can think of and they'd say 'yeah, yeah send us a tape and a photo and we'll get back to you'. Five months later those exact same people, who don't even remember me calling them up, were calling me saying 'hey, can we have lunch' and 'can I buy you dinner' and everything else. I was not working during those five or six months, I was just constantly on the phone all the time. I bummed money from my band all the time, they actually kind of supported me while I did this while they worked. My one guitar player, on his 20th birthday, we got our record deal." When these A&R people started coming around, did they start calling you up personally? "Yeah, I had a few start calling me up. CBS was really on us, and I had a couple of others entertain us a little bit. By the time it came down to all the labels checking us out, it was Atlantic, Arista, CBS and MCA. Our lawyer had them down there." How did you hook up with David Codikow, your lawyer? "David came down to see us at one show, he'd heard about us, and he said 'well, you guys are good. I see potential, and I think in about six months something will happen. Just play as many shows as you possibly can, and keep working at it, and I'll keep in touch with you.' Well, he kept in touch with us, and four months later we were on our way to Texas to record our album." When you first got together, was your songwriting pretty much the same as it is now? "No, not at all. When we first got together our writing was a little bit more on the mainstream side, and I was totally off on a different trip, and so was our drummer. The band wanted to go on a different trip. I'm a big CULT fan. I like the CULT, and the CURE, and this trippier stuff than my band does. I like BILLY IDOL a lot, things like that. My band is more into things like DOKKEN. When I joined the band, they wanted to go towards a different style too, and so we just kind of cut the music up a little bit. And when we cut the music up, everybody really liked what we were doing. It just fell together really well because we got a little funkier and started going for it, and it all came out to be BANG TANGO." Do you hear your influences in your recording? "I hear them here and there. At the time we were writing we weren't thinking 'well, what does this sound like,' or 'does it sound like this band.' We were just basically writing to whatever pleased us. That's probably why the album came out like it did, because you'll hear one song, and then the next song will sound completely different. I think that's how it got that way, because we didn't pay attention to what other bands we were sounding like. We just went in every direction." Did you write a lot of songs? "Yeah. After the EP and the album, and giving a song to the movie 'Black Roses', we still had eight songs left over." So is all of this freaking you out? "Yeah!! Ha! Ha! I'm still fucking going 'No Way!' I can't believe it!!! I've got four CD's in my hand, we've got the CD for "Attack Of Life", the CD with "Someone Like You", the CD for the album, the CD for the EP, and I'm like sitting here going 'No Way', a year ago I didn't... you know. We've got all this new equipment. When you make the decision about what label you're going to go with, if you get to make that decision, it's tough. If you have choices, like we could have went with CBS, but we were so afraid that we were gonna get stock on a shelf somewhere, you know, put on a back-burner until somebody decided we were ready. The label we went with, the people that worked with us, were really believing in us. We shot this incredible video. It was done by the guys who did BILLY IDOL'S "Flesh For Fantasy" and "Eyes Without A Face". They did the movie "The Kid's Are Alright". They're incredible, and I think this video is gonna make our band really go." Where was the "Live Injection" EP recorded? "That was recorded at Oceanway Studios (in LA), which is a hall, and we told everybody who came to see us in the past that we were gonna do a free thing, everybody can get in and there'll be beer there, and we just got a ton of our friends. There were like 200 people there, and we played the show and then we took a break for like an hour, and then we got back up and did the whole thing over again." So what was it like recording the album in Texas? "It was weird. That's how we got the name of our album, "Psycho Cafe". Picture my bass player, with his hair, which is dyed blinding red, like the colour of a stop sign, and my guitar player has purple hair, and we all got this trippy looking hair, and we're in this town that's just like the old town in "Back To The Future". Everyday, before we went to record, we'd go to this cafe, and the food was great, but the people were all like Stepford Wives. They were weird, they were so subdued and everything. And the place where we recorded the album, this fawn is the oldest one in all of the US and the place where we recorded was this famous music hall and then it turned into a Fire Station, and then into the recording studio. It was this really creepy old building, so we named the place and the album "Psycho Cafe". How was it working with producer Howard Benson? "Fantastic, man. The guy's a genius." Did he rearrange your songs at all? "Not really. He shortened 'em and tightened 'em up a little bit, like all producers end up doing anyway. He was like a wrench, that just came in and adjusted a few things here and there, but he didn't make any major changes, or make anything totally different He pissed me off a lot in the studio, but he brought a lot of things out" How did he do that? "He purposely pissed me off. He'd make me sing and sing, and then do it again and again until it was near his perfection. I got really mad and I just said 'Fuck you!' I just couldn't take it anymore. But by the time it was done, he said, 'You know Joe, that's my way of doing things, I pissed you off and brought out this energy. I knew it was there.' It really came out on the album." Do you worry that you're releasing too many things at once, with the 'Black Roses' soundtrack and 'Street Survivors' records on Metal Blade, the live EP and the album? "Some of that stuff that you see isn't really us. The 'Black Roses' thing started off with these two goons that we recorded with, one guy wasn't such a goon, but the other guy was a complete idiot. We got on that record with our old drummer. We gave them the song "I'm A Stranger", which wasn't really the direction we were going at the time. We were going to record another song, but the drummer took so long in the studio that we never really got to do the other song. Metal Blade owns the rights to this, and turned around and said we owed them another song. We had let our old drummer's father, who is in the music business, check out the contract, and we had to give them another song, so we gave them "Love Injection" from our live EP. I don't think it will hurt us, I think it's a great marketing opportunity. Our album is coming out, and all these people already know about us. Look what it's done for our EP (which has sold almost 20,000 copies in the first two months with no advertising). So what are your plans for touring? "There's a few bands that are thinking of putting us on tour, but I can't really say, because if I say, and then it doesn't happen, I'd feel like an idiot" How is it being with MCA/Mechanic Records? "It's fantastic. MCA is the overseer of everything we do, but Steve Sinclair at Mechanic is a real push-a-holic. He's just constantly pushing this band to everybody and everywhere. MCA is really into it. We get a lot of attention from the label. They're not known for metal bands, and this year that's what they want to do, and guess who they're going to start with!! Buy Bang Tango CDs: |
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