Post by John on Nov 7, 2017 11:08:39 GMT -5
here is what i was able to get done today. about the first 1/2 hour. after what i typed, it just kinda turns into small talk so i'm not going to type all of that out...
He lives in Piacenza Italy
Starting an Eat The Heat live tour
Jimmy: the ETH album doesn’t fit into the mold of other Accept albums. Your vocal style does, but the music doesn’t. how has this album been so divisive among Accept fans?
DR: fans, especially European fans are loyal to bands until death. Loyal to the end of the earth. The fans felt that their lives had been ruined. How could you do this? 50% of fans loved it, but 50% of the fans absolutely hated it and I still get that hate to this day. Did I answer your question.
Jimmy: yes, of course you did. There’s the Udo factor. He’s now out of the band.
DR: yes, to me, he IS the voice of Accept. He’s that german tank, that panzer, that delivered. His look, his image, everything was so Acceptable, no pun intended, that the german metalhead, male species, felt comfortable with this guy. They said “hey, this is our dude”. he ain’t pretty. He ain’t go hair out to here. He’s not wearing lipstick. This is one of us. And that was, and still is his “factor”.
Jimmy: the strange thing about this album, the vocals themselves, you’re singing in a head voice, very raspy sound, very similar to Udo’s. of course you’re not Udo, but very similar, in terms of style. If you strip away the drums, you keep the guitars and you keep the vocals, I guess if you unslick the production somehow, you might actually have an Accept album there.
DR: that in part, a large part, was Stephan kaufmann, the drummer at the time, was experimenting with Simmons, the electric drum thing, that fad that was happening. The guy’s got an ear from some other planet. When he was talking to the people that designed it, he heard an ultra millisecond delay in the snare so he literally had a meeting with charts showing them that this thing is not correct. I felt, and I still feel that the drum sound is crap on that album. I don’t like it, compared to the basic hard rock, metal, organic drum sound, but that was in the time where they felt, well, by getting a guy like me from America, they could only bust a nut with about 400,000 copies with BTTW, Russian Roulette didn’t do so well, it did good, but the record companies were leaning heavily with saying “this is a band with a history, you need a guy who can speak English, and we need to fly across this big pond of water and break this band in America.” Because they were the kings and they did really well in europe but they could never crack that nut in the US. They could do smaller theaters up to large venues and do ok. That was the whole, you know, record company “let’s do this”, and it hurt the band. It opened a lot of doors for me, but it closed a lot of doors as well.
Jimmy: do you think, if they would’ve decided to do another, maybe, Russian Roulette style album with you singing, it would’ve been a different story completely?
DR: absolutely. I think that trying to polish, I mean, Dieter had massive success with the scorpions, savage amusement was just at the tail end when i arrived in Accept. That album really didn’t do too well either. Rhythm of love made some noise, blah blah blah, but they were trying to polish there too, leaning into that American market. You know, the saturation story, which ultimately killed itself I think. But I think if I would’ve done a record more in the vain of XTC, D-Train, and that, we could’ve really nailed it and maintained that metalhead devotion. Like “ok, you’re not Udo but these guys are ripping it up”. maybe a R&W kind of organic, dry, metal album. Back to the roots. It seems to that, well, reading an interview with wolf the other day, he says “I don’t want to be a nostalgic act, I still want to have some validity in my career”. A lot of bands are touring off of, you know, british steel, or whatever band it is, but I really think we did something there. I always thought that, at the time of course I thought that this was bigger than God you know, this is fantastic. But a funny thing happened while we were recording the album, we were probably about 75% through and dieter stopped recording and spun around in his big chair and looked at me and said “you realize that if this album fails, it’s my fault and your fault. They always blame the producer and the singer, especially when they change singers”. And I said “awe, no way, the world’s gonna love me”. But you know what? No truer words came out of a mans mouth than that for me in the studio environment. And I hear that all the time, when he said that. it actually really pissed me off when he said it but, you know, he was right! This is not going to be easy Dave, you’ve got a great album but that doesn’t mean that the loyalty is going to stay with us. The loyalty is loyal to one thing right. So I think that they were, you know, praying that if that did happen, that we’d open the door to a newer audience and carry the band to another place in space and time. And that didn’t happen either.
Jimmy: do you think if the album had been called anything other than Accept, let’s say D-Train or XTC, hahaha, Do you think if the album would’ve been called something else, it would’ve been more accepting to the 50% of the Accept fans who didn’t accept it?
DR: yep. Accept carries a lot of weight dude. that name has been around since they started playing little tents in Holland. I mean, they pounded the ground dude.
Jimmy: I think it would’ve been called something else like XTC or D-Train, or just another project of wolf, that people would’ve been more accepting of it and it would’ve done, been a lot more successful, and that 50% would’ve said “you know, it’s just a side project of wolf’s, with dave”. I really think it would’ve been a totally different game changer. Taking the brand name of Accept that people are used to, the organic, the raw, the hard hitting metal, and polishing it up like this with the drums, and I think you nailed it, it’s the drums, and maybe the lyrical content was a little more softer verses, you know, fast as a shark. Going to the lyrics, who penned the lyrics and what was that process like?
DR: it was a nightmare, to be honest, uh, Gaby, her name is Deaffy on a lot of the records, she is a co-lyric writer because her English is good, she’s a pretty good lyricist. She wrote a lot of those classics. I had to basically say, you know, we’re going to reach this American audience and there were arguments going on about, wow, do we sing about fast sharks or where do we go, and I brought in my American street thing and what I’d experience and we’d throw a lyric out, sit on the terrace and pen lyrics to these riffs and then I’d have to show them to her and because of her and the german mentality, they don’t really grasp the America slang. So I think that, that was another factor, and the misunderstanding of where the album was and where it is. XTC was banned in England because I was told, the drug, ecstasy was taking over and they thought I was singing about ecstasy. No, I was singing about sex. A lot of the titles, the titles were already there. Turn The Wheel Around. Mistreated, Gaby had written because she was angry at one of the band members, felt betrayed. D-Train was from New York slang about suicide. So I basically assumed, what they were saying to me, like Generation Clash already had a lot of the lyrics written, but I added some to it.
Jimmy: what about hellhammer?
DR: I pretty much put that one together. The chorus was already there. I think I already had, I wrote those verses. But I know the chorus, hellhammer, was already there. That’s traditional Accept.
Jimmy: what about wolf’s guitar? Did he do all the guitar work?
DR: yeah.
Jimmy: yeah, he did all the guitar work, then they just brought in the rhythm guitarist, I can’t remember his name.
DR: No, wolf Hoffmann, I believe has always done all the guitars, maybe herman frank in the early days did some,
Jimmy: Jim Stacey
DR: Jim Stacey was a hired guy, because jorg fischer, when I first joined the band, the final audition was a live gig in colone, jorg was in the band at the time. But there was some kind of weird thing going on, between wolf and him, and him not preparing, I don’t really know because I like jorg. They fired him because I think it had come up that he wanted to be more part of the album, and play on it more, and they would always say, well, what have you got? You know. that whole drama developed, but he was fired, but wolf did everything with the inspiration from dieter dierks. Dieter’s really good. See when you record with dieter dierks, it’s a lot different, you don’t go in as a group. the rhythm section records and they come back in and start doing over their parts. They sit alone in the control room and record, which is really weird to me. But that’s how they do it, and with wolf, it was like, he really walked through it. now, I took wolf to see stevey ray Vaughn in Germany, never heard of him. Then the next day wolf had every SRV album I could imagine and I could hear him doing scuddlebuttin’ and stuff in his room because he was fascinated by the guys technique. And on some of that album, like generation clash’s solo, I heard, if you listen to the strat, uh, david Gilmore, I really heard that clear tone, that’s where that came from, and that was my suggestion. Which was foreign for him, but he actually, he really nailed it.
Jimmy: Herman Frank did not play on BTTW, just so you know. Gaby is great, she penned the best songs of Accept, lyrically, especially BTTW.
DR: one of her marketing ideas was those little sticky balls, you know the ones you throw at a dart board, she had mentioned at one time to Epic, let’s make a dart board where the guy’s sitting on the desk on the phone making deals and he throws the ball that sticks to the album cover. Things like that with marketing ideas, she’s great at. She’s also very good with the press. She really knows how to manipulate, how to promote, how to get the best attention, she’s devoted her life to wolf.
Jimmy: what was the mood like when you were doing the album? Like wolf was really positive that this was going to do well. What was everybody’s expectations?
DR: a lot of fear. Anxiety. Is this going to work? But also a lot of, like, this is really great. They kinda stepped away for the traditional dadadadadadadada, they were actually playing. There were some big blowouts, I remember one that, on Chain Reaction, between gaby and i. on that lyric, she hated it, from what I know, she tried to stop it. I think was happed too, was that she had that force of writing all the lyrics, and then I came in and I was just starting to be a lyricist, so I’m throwing that out, and she said, “no, I’m the lyricist”. So we had that power struggle. And I was a young guy, thinking I knew everything, and I didn’t play that game well. She probably played it a little better than me. She could’ve played it better and understanding. I would say “well you made the decision to do this, and now we’re doing it, and now you don’t like it”. that happened a few times. Then they actually had a woman that was working in the studio that was an American off the military base, and they would take my lyrics to her to critique. Now this young girl had now clue what Rocking Horse, or Rats In the Cellar, or what any of those words meant. She’d actually read them and say “well, I don’t understand this”. they would say, well david’s calling it slang. Is it correct? And she’d say “no, no. I don’t get it”. so we butted heads, but there was always that, you know, fear of failure. But, if we don’t do it, this is really going to be bad. Haha it’s like a platinum album, you know, I never had one, but the platinum paranoia, you know, I gotta right a record that bigger and better than that one. A lot of bands fail to do so. So there was conflict, but there was also a lot of oh this is great. Those memories of mine, recording and hanging out with the band in the pub after recording and hearing their stories, because I’d never done tours of that magnitude and they would talk like it was nothing. “ah we toured with them, we did this…”.
Jimmy: so let’s fast forward. You’ve announced that you’re going to do “eat The Heat Live”. A Night With David Reece, Eat The Heat Live. Why now? why are you going to do the entire album live now?
DR: it started with graham bonnett’s manager. He contacted my 6 or 7 years ago. He’d always talk to me about what the impact of ETH was for him as a young guy. And we started doing shows together and I was jamming with RPG, just a free, organic thing, just to stay busy in between bonfire shows. And he had promoted that we were going to do Accept songs from the record. And when they saw the setlist, basically, Mario, they are not Accept fans. So they didn’t want to play it. so I had to do majority rules. Jiles said “dude, people are coming to hear you sing those songs”. So we had to, well, jiles got mad and stormed out of the venue one night, which, I understand now, because he was saying “dave, this would be a good move for you”. So we ended up rehearsing Generation Clash I think, and hellhammer that day and played them live, and you know what? Of the 20 or 30 people who actually came that night, they went crazy. So then, out of the blue, my friend says “what do you think about doing David Reece does ETH live at my festival?” I said I’m tired of talking about it, let’s do it. but I said “hey, one time in Barcelona, is there anything else?” in the next 30 minutes, he booked the north of spain at the Urban Rock Concert. His wife said “ticket sales have been fantastic”. So what I’m gonna do is play in all these different countries. But logistically, trying to bring a band from where I am in Italy, financially, is a nightmare, so I’m using a Spanish band that is called “Serious”. They’re fantastic. They’re from the Accept days. They grew up with Accept. And they know every song, and they, especially fanatic about ETH, so they’re the band that backing me. I’ve seen them on film playing my songs and stuff. And I’m like, wow, these guys are like Accept. They really study it. then in other places, the plan is that I’ll probably take Andy Susemihl, you know, from UDO, he and I have done a bunch of songs together, written a bunch of song, he would be the guitarist for, say, Germany and Scandinavia and another guy from Germany and a few other german cats to do this area. And then maybe in the south, where I live, everybody’s doing it. it just works out.
Jimmy: so I guess the big question is, you’re going to be doing songs from ETH, are you going to be doing any other songs? From the Udo years?
DR: yeah. Every time we played live we did London Leatherboys and I love playing that song. And if I could do it live and give it justice, I’d really love to do FAAS or R&W, and obviously, throw in BTTW. I’ve run into Udo over the years, I’d play shows and his son Sven had a band called Damaged, and they would open for me when we played Germany. And everytime I did, if Udo was around, he’d show up. a lot of people are saying that if Udo came to one of these gig, boom, we could join one another. You know, at one time, I had this idea that Udo and I did an EP together. I’ve written a couple of songs that are for the both of us. Or maybe I would sing 2 of his Accept songs and he would sing a few of mine. And then we’d do a bonus track, well I found out yesterday that he’s actually playing XTC live, and someone that he played your song and, wow, it was fantastic. People went crazy.
Jimmy: so when was the last time you actually spoke to Udo?
DR: 2011? He was living is Ibiza spain at the time. We were playing in a converted barn in the colone area, damaged was opening, and when he walked in the front door, and I walked up to say hello, the people went nuts. It was like, wow, the 2 Accept guys are here. He didn’t get on stage because he never likes to do that but I’ll force him if I see him next time. We had a great chat. We talked about a lot of the past, our experiences, how he’s doing, and of course, Accept. We spent about an hour outside chewing the fat about life. I consider him a friend. I know his ex-wife Elka very well.
Jimmy: so, what about the guys in Accept? When’s the last time you bumped into them, spoke to them?
DR: you know, I gotta say, it’s been like, 30 years. I hear they bad-mouth me, but then I also hear that, when they were looking for a singer and they got Mark. I have a friend that would dine with them when they were in Nashville, truth or not, I don’t know if this is absolutely true, but my friend said that he was listening to demos and he asked wolf, is that an Accept tribute band and he said “no, that’s the guy we’re gonna do”, and he said “wolf, why don't you just call Reece?” haha and a certain somebody who’s with him absolutely was against it. but I would’ve done it in a heartbeat, even if I had to ride in a Winnebago or an RV behind the bus. I would’ve! He doesn’t really want to talk about that time life. I am so grateful for being able to do what I did with them. I mean, look where I am today because of that album. Otherwise, I don’t think I ever would’ve got a break.
Jimmy: time heals all wounds. I know that there was an incident with you and peter right?
DR: it’s been blown out of proportion. Of course by the time it gets on the internet or in the press, by the end of that conversation that I had a beer bottle to his throat which is absolutely bullsh*t. but I shouldn’t have acted the way I did. I was young and stupid. The band was not getting along, I snapped. I got pissed off. I’m only human.
Jimmy: have you thought about releasing a live album of ETH, or DVD?
DR: yeah, there’s legal restraints involved. I’d have to go through legal hula-hoops. I’d love to film it and you know, people at the gigs are going to post what they see. But I’d love to film a professional DVD. And I’m thinking of doing the stick thing. if you come to the show, record it, get your name, get a usb stick of that night, then I’ll take it back to Italy and do a rough mix of it, make it sound a little better... This is a big deal for me. The door was opened for me by that album.
He lives in Piacenza Italy
Starting an Eat The Heat live tour
Jimmy: the ETH album doesn’t fit into the mold of other Accept albums. Your vocal style does, but the music doesn’t. how has this album been so divisive among Accept fans?
DR: fans, especially European fans are loyal to bands until death. Loyal to the end of the earth. The fans felt that their lives had been ruined. How could you do this? 50% of fans loved it, but 50% of the fans absolutely hated it and I still get that hate to this day. Did I answer your question.
Jimmy: yes, of course you did. There’s the Udo factor. He’s now out of the band.
DR: yes, to me, he IS the voice of Accept. He’s that german tank, that panzer, that delivered. His look, his image, everything was so Acceptable, no pun intended, that the german metalhead, male species, felt comfortable with this guy. They said “hey, this is our dude”. he ain’t pretty. He ain’t go hair out to here. He’s not wearing lipstick. This is one of us. And that was, and still is his “factor”.
Jimmy: the strange thing about this album, the vocals themselves, you’re singing in a head voice, very raspy sound, very similar to Udo’s. of course you’re not Udo, but very similar, in terms of style. If you strip away the drums, you keep the guitars and you keep the vocals, I guess if you unslick the production somehow, you might actually have an Accept album there.
DR: that in part, a large part, was Stephan kaufmann, the drummer at the time, was experimenting with Simmons, the electric drum thing, that fad that was happening. The guy’s got an ear from some other planet. When he was talking to the people that designed it, he heard an ultra millisecond delay in the snare so he literally had a meeting with charts showing them that this thing is not correct. I felt, and I still feel that the drum sound is crap on that album. I don’t like it, compared to the basic hard rock, metal, organic drum sound, but that was in the time where they felt, well, by getting a guy like me from America, they could only bust a nut with about 400,000 copies with BTTW, Russian Roulette didn’t do so well, it did good, but the record companies were leaning heavily with saying “this is a band with a history, you need a guy who can speak English, and we need to fly across this big pond of water and break this band in America.” Because they were the kings and they did really well in europe but they could never crack that nut in the US. They could do smaller theaters up to large venues and do ok. That was the whole, you know, record company “let’s do this”, and it hurt the band. It opened a lot of doors for me, but it closed a lot of doors as well.
Jimmy: do you think, if they would’ve decided to do another, maybe, Russian Roulette style album with you singing, it would’ve been a different story completely?
DR: absolutely. I think that trying to polish, I mean, Dieter had massive success with the scorpions, savage amusement was just at the tail end when i arrived in Accept. That album really didn’t do too well either. Rhythm of love made some noise, blah blah blah, but they were trying to polish there too, leaning into that American market. You know, the saturation story, which ultimately killed itself I think. But I think if I would’ve done a record more in the vain of XTC, D-Train, and that, we could’ve really nailed it and maintained that metalhead devotion. Like “ok, you’re not Udo but these guys are ripping it up”. maybe a R&W kind of organic, dry, metal album. Back to the roots. It seems to that, well, reading an interview with wolf the other day, he says “I don’t want to be a nostalgic act, I still want to have some validity in my career”. A lot of bands are touring off of, you know, british steel, or whatever band it is, but I really think we did something there. I always thought that, at the time of course I thought that this was bigger than God you know, this is fantastic. But a funny thing happened while we were recording the album, we were probably about 75% through and dieter stopped recording and spun around in his big chair and looked at me and said “you realize that if this album fails, it’s my fault and your fault. They always blame the producer and the singer, especially when they change singers”. And I said “awe, no way, the world’s gonna love me”. But you know what? No truer words came out of a mans mouth than that for me in the studio environment. And I hear that all the time, when he said that. it actually really pissed me off when he said it but, you know, he was right! This is not going to be easy Dave, you’ve got a great album but that doesn’t mean that the loyalty is going to stay with us. The loyalty is loyal to one thing right. So I think that they were, you know, praying that if that did happen, that we’d open the door to a newer audience and carry the band to another place in space and time. And that didn’t happen either.
Jimmy: do you think if the album had been called anything other than Accept, let’s say D-Train or XTC, hahaha, Do you think if the album would’ve been called something else, it would’ve been more accepting to the 50% of the Accept fans who didn’t accept it?
DR: yep. Accept carries a lot of weight dude. that name has been around since they started playing little tents in Holland. I mean, they pounded the ground dude.
Jimmy: I think it would’ve been called something else like XTC or D-Train, or just another project of wolf, that people would’ve been more accepting of it and it would’ve done, been a lot more successful, and that 50% would’ve said “you know, it’s just a side project of wolf’s, with dave”. I really think it would’ve been a totally different game changer. Taking the brand name of Accept that people are used to, the organic, the raw, the hard hitting metal, and polishing it up like this with the drums, and I think you nailed it, it’s the drums, and maybe the lyrical content was a little more softer verses, you know, fast as a shark. Going to the lyrics, who penned the lyrics and what was that process like?
DR: it was a nightmare, to be honest, uh, Gaby, her name is Deaffy on a lot of the records, she is a co-lyric writer because her English is good, she’s a pretty good lyricist. She wrote a lot of those classics. I had to basically say, you know, we’re going to reach this American audience and there were arguments going on about, wow, do we sing about fast sharks or where do we go, and I brought in my American street thing and what I’d experience and we’d throw a lyric out, sit on the terrace and pen lyrics to these riffs and then I’d have to show them to her and because of her and the german mentality, they don’t really grasp the America slang. So I think that, that was another factor, and the misunderstanding of where the album was and where it is. XTC was banned in England because I was told, the drug, ecstasy was taking over and they thought I was singing about ecstasy. No, I was singing about sex. A lot of the titles, the titles were already there. Turn The Wheel Around. Mistreated, Gaby had written because she was angry at one of the band members, felt betrayed. D-Train was from New York slang about suicide. So I basically assumed, what they were saying to me, like Generation Clash already had a lot of the lyrics written, but I added some to it.
Jimmy: what about hellhammer?
DR: I pretty much put that one together. The chorus was already there. I think I already had, I wrote those verses. But I know the chorus, hellhammer, was already there. That’s traditional Accept.
Jimmy: what about wolf’s guitar? Did he do all the guitar work?
DR: yeah.
Jimmy: yeah, he did all the guitar work, then they just brought in the rhythm guitarist, I can’t remember his name.
DR: No, wolf Hoffmann, I believe has always done all the guitars, maybe herman frank in the early days did some,
Jimmy: Jim Stacey
DR: Jim Stacey was a hired guy, because jorg fischer, when I first joined the band, the final audition was a live gig in colone, jorg was in the band at the time. But there was some kind of weird thing going on, between wolf and him, and him not preparing, I don’t really know because I like jorg. They fired him because I think it had come up that he wanted to be more part of the album, and play on it more, and they would always say, well, what have you got? You know. that whole drama developed, but he was fired, but wolf did everything with the inspiration from dieter dierks. Dieter’s really good. See when you record with dieter dierks, it’s a lot different, you don’t go in as a group. the rhythm section records and they come back in and start doing over their parts. They sit alone in the control room and record, which is really weird to me. But that’s how they do it, and with wolf, it was like, he really walked through it. now, I took wolf to see stevey ray Vaughn in Germany, never heard of him. Then the next day wolf had every SRV album I could imagine and I could hear him doing scuddlebuttin’ and stuff in his room because he was fascinated by the guys technique. And on some of that album, like generation clash’s solo, I heard, if you listen to the strat, uh, david Gilmore, I really heard that clear tone, that’s where that came from, and that was my suggestion. Which was foreign for him, but he actually, he really nailed it.
Jimmy: Herman Frank did not play on BTTW, just so you know. Gaby is great, she penned the best songs of Accept, lyrically, especially BTTW.
DR: one of her marketing ideas was those little sticky balls, you know the ones you throw at a dart board, she had mentioned at one time to Epic, let’s make a dart board where the guy’s sitting on the desk on the phone making deals and he throws the ball that sticks to the album cover. Things like that with marketing ideas, she’s great at. She’s also very good with the press. She really knows how to manipulate, how to promote, how to get the best attention, she’s devoted her life to wolf.
Jimmy: what was the mood like when you were doing the album? Like wolf was really positive that this was going to do well. What was everybody’s expectations?
DR: a lot of fear. Anxiety. Is this going to work? But also a lot of, like, this is really great. They kinda stepped away for the traditional dadadadadadadada, they were actually playing. There were some big blowouts, I remember one that, on Chain Reaction, between gaby and i. on that lyric, she hated it, from what I know, she tried to stop it. I think was happed too, was that she had that force of writing all the lyrics, and then I came in and I was just starting to be a lyricist, so I’m throwing that out, and she said, “no, I’m the lyricist”. So we had that power struggle. And I was a young guy, thinking I knew everything, and I didn’t play that game well. She probably played it a little better than me. She could’ve played it better and understanding. I would say “well you made the decision to do this, and now we’re doing it, and now you don’t like it”. that happened a few times. Then they actually had a woman that was working in the studio that was an American off the military base, and they would take my lyrics to her to critique. Now this young girl had now clue what Rocking Horse, or Rats In the Cellar, or what any of those words meant. She’d actually read them and say “well, I don’t understand this”. they would say, well david’s calling it slang. Is it correct? And she’d say “no, no. I don’t get it”. so we butted heads, but there was always that, you know, fear of failure. But, if we don’t do it, this is really going to be bad. Haha it’s like a platinum album, you know, I never had one, but the platinum paranoia, you know, I gotta right a record that bigger and better than that one. A lot of bands fail to do so. So there was conflict, but there was also a lot of oh this is great. Those memories of mine, recording and hanging out with the band in the pub after recording and hearing their stories, because I’d never done tours of that magnitude and they would talk like it was nothing. “ah we toured with them, we did this…”.
Jimmy: so let’s fast forward. You’ve announced that you’re going to do “eat The Heat Live”. A Night With David Reece, Eat The Heat Live. Why now? why are you going to do the entire album live now?
DR: it started with graham bonnett’s manager. He contacted my 6 or 7 years ago. He’d always talk to me about what the impact of ETH was for him as a young guy. And we started doing shows together and I was jamming with RPG, just a free, organic thing, just to stay busy in between bonfire shows. And he had promoted that we were going to do Accept songs from the record. And when they saw the setlist, basically, Mario, they are not Accept fans. So they didn’t want to play it. so I had to do majority rules. Jiles said “dude, people are coming to hear you sing those songs”. So we had to, well, jiles got mad and stormed out of the venue one night, which, I understand now, because he was saying “dave, this would be a good move for you”. So we ended up rehearsing Generation Clash I think, and hellhammer that day and played them live, and you know what? Of the 20 or 30 people who actually came that night, they went crazy. So then, out of the blue, my friend says “what do you think about doing David Reece does ETH live at my festival?” I said I’m tired of talking about it, let’s do it. but I said “hey, one time in Barcelona, is there anything else?” in the next 30 minutes, he booked the north of spain at the Urban Rock Concert. His wife said “ticket sales have been fantastic”. So what I’m gonna do is play in all these different countries. But logistically, trying to bring a band from where I am in Italy, financially, is a nightmare, so I’m using a Spanish band that is called “Serious”. They’re fantastic. They’re from the Accept days. They grew up with Accept. And they know every song, and they, especially fanatic about ETH, so they’re the band that backing me. I’ve seen them on film playing my songs and stuff. And I’m like, wow, these guys are like Accept. They really study it. then in other places, the plan is that I’ll probably take Andy Susemihl, you know, from UDO, he and I have done a bunch of songs together, written a bunch of song, he would be the guitarist for, say, Germany and Scandinavia and another guy from Germany and a few other german cats to do this area. And then maybe in the south, where I live, everybody’s doing it. it just works out.
Jimmy: so I guess the big question is, you’re going to be doing songs from ETH, are you going to be doing any other songs? From the Udo years?
DR: yeah. Every time we played live we did London Leatherboys and I love playing that song. And if I could do it live and give it justice, I’d really love to do FAAS or R&W, and obviously, throw in BTTW. I’ve run into Udo over the years, I’d play shows and his son Sven had a band called Damaged, and they would open for me when we played Germany. And everytime I did, if Udo was around, he’d show up. a lot of people are saying that if Udo came to one of these gig, boom, we could join one another. You know, at one time, I had this idea that Udo and I did an EP together. I’ve written a couple of songs that are for the both of us. Or maybe I would sing 2 of his Accept songs and he would sing a few of mine. And then we’d do a bonus track, well I found out yesterday that he’s actually playing XTC live, and someone that he played your song and, wow, it was fantastic. People went crazy.
Jimmy: so when was the last time you actually spoke to Udo?
DR: 2011? He was living is Ibiza spain at the time. We were playing in a converted barn in the colone area, damaged was opening, and when he walked in the front door, and I walked up to say hello, the people went nuts. It was like, wow, the 2 Accept guys are here. He didn’t get on stage because he never likes to do that but I’ll force him if I see him next time. We had a great chat. We talked about a lot of the past, our experiences, how he’s doing, and of course, Accept. We spent about an hour outside chewing the fat about life. I consider him a friend. I know his ex-wife Elka very well.
Jimmy: so, what about the guys in Accept? When’s the last time you bumped into them, spoke to them?
DR: you know, I gotta say, it’s been like, 30 years. I hear they bad-mouth me, but then I also hear that, when they were looking for a singer and they got Mark. I have a friend that would dine with them when they were in Nashville, truth or not, I don’t know if this is absolutely true, but my friend said that he was listening to demos and he asked wolf, is that an Accept tribute band and he said “no, that’s the guy we’re gonna do”, and he said “wolf, why don't you just call Reece?” haha and a certain somebody who’s with him absolutely was against it. but I would’ve done it in a heartbeat, even if I had to ride in a Winnebago or an RV behind the bus. I would’ve! He doesn’t really want to talk about that time life. I am so grateful for being able to do what I did with them. I mean, look where I am today because of that album. Otherwise, I don’t think I ever would’ve got a break.
Jimmy: time heals all wounds. I know that there was an incident with you and peter right?
DR: it’s been blown out of proportion. Of course by the time it gets on the internet or in the press, by the end of that conversation that I had a beer bottle to his throat which is absolutely bullsh*t. but I shouldn’t have acted the way I did. I was young and stupid. The band was not getting along, I snapped. I got pissed off. I’m only human.
Jimmy: have you thought about releasing a live album of ETH, or DVD?
DR: yeah, there’s legal restraints involved. I’d have to go through legal hula-hoops. I’d love to film it and you know, people at the gigs are going to post what they see. But I’d love to film a professional DVD. And I’m thinking of doing the stick thing. if you come to the show, record it, get your name, get a usb stick of that night, then I’ll take it back to Italy and do a rough mix of it, make it sound a little better... This is a big deal for me. The door was opened for me by that album.