Latest Album: Tres Caballeros. Bryan Beller, bassist, with Marco Minneman drums and Guthrie Govan on guitar.
A lot of stuff going on there on that album and certainly not going to be accused of chasing radio play. You’ve all got a lot going on with various projects and commitments. How do you make the time to get together and write material?
Well, we write individually and that is how that works. See, there are nine songs on every Aristocrats album and we each contribute three songs. We all had solo albums out before The Aristocrats was formed so we are all capable of making our own fully formed demos. So basically, we make the demo and then we exchange them with everybody then we talk about them and decide what we are into and then we go into the studio and make them so then it becomes an Aristocrats song. So, that helps but it is still sometimes a challenge to find time even to do that.
Are there any issues with reigning in the musicianship side of things with each other’s songs so it is not a case of ‘don’t touch my song’?
Well, I think that we are all conscious of that style of music when we’re writing a song that it is just a vehicle for soloing or just to show off. None of us are really interested in that. There may ne complicated passages in this music but hopefully it is all to the service of the song, you know. I think that one of the reasons that we work well together as a unit is that we all share that same ethos. On this album, for my songs in particular [Texas Crazypants, Through the Flower and Smuggler’s Corridor], Texas has a pretty fast line through the chorus but other than that, none of it is all super charged or anything like that. It is just instrumental music.
A lot of songs put down the rhythm track for the guitarist to then solo however. In your songs, it appears that Guthrie tends to follow a lot of the tonalities and chordal references that your bass playing includes.
Well, you know, Guthrie and I are funny in the way that we write for each other. I listen to a lot of gutar music but not like, you know, shredding music but more your John Schofield and Mike Landau and Bill Fresell so I like a beautiful sounding guitar and so I am essentially writing for guitar. That is always what I have done for my solo stuff and for The Aristocrats. So I’ll write parts on guitar and people will assume that Guthrie wrote it. Luigal Stomp on the Culture Clash album is a super guitar showcase but I wrote it. Through the Flower is a very long and involved guitar showcase as well but again, I wrote it. Smugglers Corridor is a spaghetti western kind of thing and it all sounds very guitar but that is almost a give away that I wrote it. Whereas, if the song has a very complicated, high register bassline, it is almost certain that Guthrie wrote it. Jack’s Back is his song and that song has a ridiculous bass part which is all over the neck with lots of chords, double stops, melodies because Guthrie is interested in trying to create the most we could possibly get out of a trio harmonically and voicing wise. So something like that or Kentucky Meat Shower has some really high register bass melodies. Guthrie is quite a good bass player, I have to say.
Both songs you mentioned, this one first one, Jack’s Back almost comes across as free jazz.
Yeah it is all composed, that’s for sure. It is one of the more scripted songs actually, in our repertoire but it is all kind of loose and jangly.
Kentucky Meat Shower starts off as some sort of Albert Lee style song and then goes into something completely different.
Yes, well, that song is telling a story. Ideally, all of these songs are telling a story because we like to share with the audience where we were coming from when we wrote these things. In that case, I don’t want to spoil it for everybody but Guthrie was trying to relate an incident that occurred in the late 1880’s when literally it rained meat all over a small town in Kentucky which is a rural part of the USA. So you can imagine things are peaceful in the small country town and then all of a sudden the skies open up and lo and behold, it’s, you know, a meat thunderstorm so that is what the middle of the song is all about. The heavy rock song is the meat thunderstorm right there.
That almost sounds like the sort of stuff you’d be doing for Dethklok.
Well, that’s a whole other story. Haha.
The Aristocrats came about from a jam at NAMM. Is it fair to say some of the better collaborations come about when they are not scripted out?
I don’t really have the answer to that question. The Aristocrats happened because Marco [Minneman] and I knew each other for years doing gigs on and off for other people along with Mike Kenneally. Then he had a gig in Russia with him in Vladavostok and got invited to bring a band there. So he invited Greg How who is a great guitarist and me. We did it and it went well and then I got invited to do a show at a bass concert – the Anaheim bass bash at NAMM and I thought this would be different if I can in with a band instead of making it all bassman’s bassist and to me that is boring anyway so I just thought we should bring in this band that we just had at the Russia gig. We were going to do it but Greg had to back out a month before and then we ended up finding Guthrie because there was a fan on Facebook who is the biggest Guthrie fan in the world and he kept writing me saying, ‘you’ve played with Steve Vai and Mike Kenneally, now you’ve got to play with the world’s next greatest guitarist, Guthrie Goven’ and I’m like, ‘who?’. I literally did not know who he was. So finally when I remembered what this guy said and we needed a guitarist I thought I should watch a video. So I watched him on YouTube and thought how is it possible that I didn’t know who this person was? He’s ridiculous. So we did our first gig where we each did two songs from our own back catalogue. You could call it a jam but really it was a project in which this band performed two songs of each of our solo material. It went so well that we realized that there was something greater than the sum of it’s parts there and so that is how that band formed. Other bands form generally through a bunch of random, strange occurrences.
Do you think that Guthrie feels any pressure to play to the standard of Vai or Satch?
Oh no, this is going to sound arrogant but if anything…we just did this G3 tour in Europe where is was Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and The Aristocrats which was like a huge honour. I was so thrilled that we were able to do that and the G3 thing is at the end where the three guitarists have got to get up there and kind of trade solos. If anything, Joe and Steve were nervous to play around Guthrie. Not that they were nervous, I’m not going to put that in their mouths but I mean like, they’re aware that Guthrie can do things on the guitar that they can’t do because Guthrie is a total freak. Guthrie doesn’t have an issue with any of this stuff, he just wants to be himself and be musical. Joe is always going to sound like Joe. Same with Steve and those guys are legends, they are always going to have their thing. Guthrie is not nervous about that sort of stuff and if anything he doesn’t want to be in the whole guitar hero world at all although that is kind of his destiny in a way.
A classic irony. I suspect you might get shred fanboys comparing you to Stu Hamm or Billy Sheehan.
Well, if they’re comparing me to Billy Sheehan Stu Hamm then they’re just not listening. They are both amazing and they are two guys whose intial approach to the instrument was ground breakingly technical.