Pepper Keenan is having a difficult time keeping things straight these days. Earlier this year, he saw his main band, Corrosion of Conformity – where he sings and plays guitar – release a double album. April’s Good God / Baad Man received some of their best reviews in years, as did the ensuing tour, which kicked off in mid-spring and wrapped up earlier this month.
“The C.O.C. record came out a few months ago,” he tells Vanyaland. “It’s just such a whirlwind of…not many people get to put two albums out in the same year with different bands. And they’re both relevant. So, it’s a weird feeling all around.”
The other band Keenan plays with would be Down, where he shares guitar duties with Crowbar’s Kirk Windstein. A supergroup of lifelong New Orleans friends who found success with different, primary outfits started jamming in the early ‘90s. Pantera’s Phil Anselmo on vocals, bassist Pat Bruders from Crowbar, and Eyehategod’s Jimmy Bower on drums round out the current lineup. It still sounds like the doomiest Black Sabbath dragged through the Louisiana swamps.
“The C.O.C. record’s still being promoted, and I go back on tour with that in a couple of weeks again,” Keenan says. “So my brain’s kind of scrambled right now.”
Last week, the first single from the upcoming Down Volume V long-player, “Blood Oath,” dropped without warning and immediately began showing up in their sets on a tour that comes through The Palladium in Worcester on Wednesday night (August 26), with support from Helmet and Spirit in the Room.
“It’s a big heavy metal love letter,” Keenan says of the new LP as we settle in for a 617 Q&A (Six Questions; One Recommendation; Seven Somethings). He then talks about the origins of Down when they were a demo tape passed around in the underground, professes his love for a super deluxe Black Sabbath album, and lets us know what he thinks about a bunch of random peppers.
***
:: SIX QUESTIONS
Michael Christopher: It’s been a little bit over 30 years since the first Down record came out. How has the band evolved to you in terms of what it means? It started in the early ’90s when you were just jamming with some friends…
Pepper Keenan: It’s still the same thing, dude. We haven’t put any more pressure on ourselves, hence why we do [new music] so rarely. But when we do do ‘em, and we’re still in a circle, we’re still drinking beer and smoking weed and rocking out like we’re teenagers. It’s still the same thing, the same mentality. I don’t think that could ever change. We’ve known each other for so long. It’s just a bunch of metalhead buffoons who grew up in the same neighborhood.
Is it true that when you were first getting started, you used to pass demo tapes around to people and say, “Hey, did you hear this band Down?”
Thousand percent. The first demo that we did – a three-song demo that we did – Phil with Pantera was kind of gaining some ground, and C.O.C. was touring all over the place. And Phil and I were big tape traders. I had Mercyful Fate demos from Denmark and shit. And we would do the same thing. We’d go on tour, and we’d let people hear it. And it started spreading around. And then we knew the underground was really something serious because I was in Sweden and C.O.C. was playing the show. And a kid from after the show in Sweden at the C.O.C. show came up to me and asked me if I had heard this band called Down. Because we didn’t say it was us. We never said it was. That was an interesting little experiment that Phil and I did. So yeah, that was a thing. And nobody really knew it was us till we played a show.
Do you think they’ll ever see the light of day officially, demos on some sort of expanded edition of NOLA?
I mean, I’ve got them. I’ve got all three of them. Yeah, I’ve got a lot of unheard… we got riff tapes that we used to send each other. I got them all in a shoebox, man. I need to transfer them fucking things. But yeah, there’s a lot of old artwork and weird shit we’re just kind of hanging onto.
Does it surprise you how much people took to Down? I mean, you couldn’t have thought it was going to be what it became.
Well, kind of. [laughs] We knew it was something different. We knew it was something cool, and we knew it was written by people who loved that type of music. If I wasn’t in the band, I’d think it was cool – the way we were approaching it. Did I think it would have legs this long? I mean, I knew it was cool. I knew it was good. It ain’t Back in Black good. But if you’re a heavy metal person and you’re dead serious about heavy metal, [NOLA] needs to be in your collection, I think. The only way I could really explain it. It’s kind of a staple of that thing, I would think, without being big-headed, but yeah.
Did you always know there was going to be a second record, or were you like, “I don’t know, maybe one day we’ll get to do that.”
It was a maybe one day thing. That’s the one we did at Phil’s house in 28 days. Yeah, we were out of our minds. We wrote and recorded that record in 28 days. From scratch. That was absolutely insane. We had two engineers. We were working 24 hours a day. Certain members of the band would work at midnight on, and then the rhythm dudes, me and Kirk and Rex [Brown, then on bass] were going during the day. We tracked shit in between. And we had a mountain of beer cans about five feet high. We had one pile of blown speakers in – we rented all this gear from Nashville and had it shipped down to Louisiana… studio equipment, quality.
So of course, the studio people were shitting on themselves when they saw the location and where they were dropping this stuff off at, and how we were going to attempt to do this. So yeah, it was pretty epic in its endeavor. We pushed it real hard on that one. But I can’t remember how the hell we even got in that position to do a second record. I really can’t. It’s a blur. [laughs]
Obviously wasn’t too planned out if you were writing, recording, doing the whole thing at once.
We brought a producer in. We had it mapped out, but we knew we didn’t want to leave where we were at. We didn’t want to go to New York. We didn’t want to go to L.A. We’re like, “Fuck it, let’s just try and rent all this equipment and bring it to us.” And we had it for, like, 31 days, and they made us sign insurance papers and shit, and they were sending an 18-wheeler back in 31 days to get the shit, whether we were done or not. By the time we got it set up, and we’re hitting play, we were already three days into it. [laughs]
But that record’s a monster. It’s a fucking monster. It was a prime example of being at the top of your game and just going for it. Phil was writing lyrics all night long, just coming up with shit. And then a lot of times he would come downstairs and track shit, and he’d go to bed at seven in the morning. I’d get down there at eight in the morning, I’d hear what he did, and I’d recut my guitars after something he had done. That happened quite a few times because he was up in the house and coming back with ideas. We were too worn out to almost be in the same room at the same time, even though we were 20 feet away from each other.
We’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of Down III: Over the Under [2007]. You just put out the remastered edition, and I wanted to know about the bonus track “Invest in Fear.” How come that didn’t make the first iteration of that record?
That’s a good question. I heard that the other day, and it had been so long, I thought it was on the record. [laughs] But I don’t remember why we didn’t put it on there. I just think the flow of what we had – I think we were getting to a point where it was just getting to be too much information and wasn’t really adding to the overall feel of the record. It’s a cool song.
***
How does the new record differ from, or maybe how is it the same as the rest of the Down catalog?
Well, we recorded it closer to the way we did NOLA. And I’m in one speaker and Kirk’s in the other. We did one guitar track each. So, it sounds amazing, but it’s very simplistic in its approach, almost like Back in Black. I’m not saying that’s a simple [album], but stripped down. It’s not a lot of overdubs. It’s straight and to the point. We really focused on the songwriting and arrangements and didn’t put a lot of glitz and shit on top of it. I like doing that as well, but it’s more straightforward, not necessarily in terms of the songwriting, but in terms of the production. I kind of think the world needed that a little bit, you know?
With everything so overproduced and –
Everything’s overproduced, right.
You opened up a lot of cans of worms with the Garza podcast that you did recently. Some of the information that you dropped on there, like the crown of thorns you’re wearing on the back cover of the NOLA is the same one from Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose” video.
Yeah. Yeah. All true. I made a mistake on that. I don’t know why I said what I said, but H-Gun studios was not in New York City. They were in Chicago. I meant to call Garza and tell him to fix that. I don’t know why on earth I said that. I knew damn well they were in Chicago. But yeah, everything else is true.
:: ONE RECOMMENDATION
Pepper Keenan: If you had the wherewithal, have more children. I wish I’d have had more kids when I look back at things like that.
You have a daughter, right?
Yep, yep. She’s awesome. But looking back at things, yeah, who knows? I’m pretty good at it. I would’ve liked to have had… I wouldn’t want to have five or six, but just to bring them into the world and raise them right and all that kind of shit. It’s important, man.
But I would say maybe just for fun, if you want to be lighthearted, I would say if anybody plays music or any type of rock and roll whatsoever, I would say to purchase the Black Sabbath Vol. 4 box set. It’s one of the most interesting recordings I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s got two records that are just outtakes of them working on these songs that you know so well. And they’re not there yet. And they put every mistake and flub, and [Tony] Iommi trying to figure the riff out and Ozzy’s dummy lyrics and just making shit up on the spot, trying to get there. And you know it so well, it’s almost nerve-wracking to listen to because you’re like, “Come on, man. You’re almost there, dude!” [laughs]
But it’s a really good experiment in terms of musicianship or being a musician. That shit didn’t fall off a tree. They weren’t geniuses; they weren’t wizards. They worked their fucking ass off, and it took that to get there. That’s the interest. When I heard that, it really took me back to why you do all this shit in the first place. It ain’t for money, it ain’t for nothing, but it’s what’s in your brain, and if it ain’t right, it’s wrong. And so, they kept doing it till it was right in their heads. But it’s fascinating. Just anything in general, if you’re trying to accomplish something in life, listen to that box set.
:: SEVEN OF SOMETHING
I’m going to give you seven examples of well-known “peppers,” and you tell me the first thing that comes to mind.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Great record. It came out [right around] when I was born, by the way.
Dr. Pepper.
I was called that a lot as a kid. Rex Brown called me Sergeant Pepper, by the way.
Where did the Pepper name originally come from, if you had it that young?
Yeah, it was my dad’s name and my grandfather’s name. My great-grandfather’s name. Supposedly it came from a father or a priest in Ireland named Father Pepper. The Keenans and the Pruitts named their first son after the priest who married them. Supposedly.
So, when Zakk Wylde is calling you “Father Pepper,” he doesn’t know how on the mark he really is.
No, No. He doesn’t know that. [laughs]
“Pepper” by Butthole Surfers.
I heard the song before. Not one of my favorite Butthole Surfers songs, but yeah. I don’t know what their meaning is behind that, what they were thinking. What’s up with the band Pepper? You know anything about them?
That was going to be my next one! They’re a reggae trio.
Whenever we’re on tour, and they’re on a marquee or something, I’ll take my picture in front of it. I’ll stand underneath it, take a picture of myself. [laughs]
Ghost peppers.
Hot as fuck. Don’t mess with them. Don’t mess with me. [laughs]
Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I loved them when I was younger. Yeah, great band. What was the George Clinton record? [Guitarist Hillell] Slovak was still on it, right?
Yep, Freaky Styley.
Yeah, the early Chili Peppers. Me and Phil used to trip on the Chili Peppers way back. The first two records.
This is not exactly Pepper, but it’s Pepa, Salt ‘N’ Pepa.
Hot band. Yeah, all about it.
Pepper shakers or pepper grinders for when you’re putting it on your food?
Got both in the kitchen. I use my pepper shaker more than the grinder.
Really? Now is it an electronic grinder or is it one that you’ve got to do the turn manually?
Something like my grandmother that left me. Old school tall one with the fucking [handle]. Yeah, got them both. [laughs]
DOWN + HELMET + SPIRIT IN THE ROOM :: Wednesday, August 26 at The Palladium, 261 Main St. in Worcester, MA :: 7:30 p.m., all ages, $64 to $76 :: Event info :: Advance tickets
