Dropping The Bomb Alex Zander interviews Val and Dreg of Fashion Bomb
The men who make up Fashion Bomb make a statement when they walk into - and dominate a room. They are easily 6’5 without their boots. Their boots push them near 7 feet. They are undoubtedly the “Tallest Band In Chicago,” almost alien like, inhuman, freaking androids or something. They are everywhere and they make their presence known. This is what they do. They become the scene each night they are out. With their belief, the music of today leans toward alienating creativity; and the philosophy that boy bands all look the same, talk the same, act the same, don’t write their own music and are cookie-cutter pop. The 5 men that are Fashion Bomb make their statement through image and lyrics. Their very name states that they are creating the fashion of the moment. They support tolerance of many different kinds of people, and that means doing whatever feels right to the individual. Whether you want to wear sleeves of tattoo work, wear large gauge piercings, or do something as simple as color your hair to express your individuality, they tolerate everyone’s choices. The majority of our society has been fed rules that state you must look like everyone else, and dress like everyone else. If someone breaks the mold and does something creative, they usually get grief, teased or gawked at. Whether out of jealousy or ignorance, it shouldn’t happen. That is the message of fashion that Fashion Bomb wants to carry. Their claim, “Everyone Else is SO Last Season”, is what they use to describe how that way of thinking is truly outdated. Their first single and forthcoming video is “The Line.” It addresses the cookie-cutter line that society falls into. They ask the question, “Why are we born young fresh minds with all the creativity in the world, then for some reason 25 years later guys and girls are all wearing khaki pants and blue shirts...why?” Society crushes the creativity of the people, they point at us and laugh, well the truth is we are the ones who have not fallen into “The Line.”
Fashion Bomb is the project of charismatic front man Adrian Valerie, who people just call “Val.” He started auditioning musicians over two years ago. Now he has his band and they have recorded a 5 song EP and have begun to perform live. It seemed a long time coming, but after catching them on their maiden show, it was clear that it was worth the wait. The Bomb has been dropped and with Val on vocals, Dreg on drums, Os on guitar, Sen on bass and Viktor on keys, the band is taking the Chicago scene by storm, with the promise to breakout soon.
We got together to do this interview on a chilly Chicago October evening for beer and quesadillas at our favorite neighborhood eatery Ranallis where everyone dining that evening had the impression that Fashion Bomb were stars. And they wouldn’t have it any other way.
Alex Zander: Val, what was your vision and what did it take to get where you’re at now?
Val: That could take hours, but in a nutshell it was a lot of going around and being in the scene. Auditioning for other bands, thinking that the best strategy would be to find a band already established to step in and do vocals for. Then you realize that 99.9% of the bands that are auditioning vocalists/placing ads are without a vocalist for a reason. They weren’t up to snuff. They didn’t have all the elements to be successful. It was just easier for me to pick and choose musicians knowing what I knew, going by training and my ear to find the right people. So that’s kind of where it all started.
AZ: What did you want to do that other guys weren’t doing?
V: It’s very rare when you can go out and find an industrial-metal band that isn’t two people onstage, such as a keyboard player and a vocalist. The keyboard is usually doing all the sounds and I wanted to have an actual band, a la’ what Trent Reznor did. Even though he was a studio produced band to begin with, he recognized that with a live band, with all the pieces; guitar, drums, keys, everything, he could put on a rocking show in that vein. In his genre he was pretty revolutionary in the fact that it was accessible music. You have to have a pretty refined ear. I mean, I love all the hardcore industrial stuff, but you have to have a pretty refined ear and it’s an acquired taste. But if you mix it with metal it makes it more accessible and it’s more fun to play.
AZ: So obviously the band is very image conscious. Why is that so important?
V: Image-wise, one of my favorite performers is Marilyn Manson, I’m sure you’re aware. The reason for that is not only that I like the CDs and the music, but when you go and see a Marilyn Manson show, if you love him or hate him, you can’t get away from the fact that he puts on a visual spectacle. Part of his music is his image. It’s a whole performance art-piece. That’s why I think image is important. I think it adds to the whole sensory experience.
AZ: But image is important all the time for you guys? If you go out, someone looks at you, you’re a band -and you should know it. Is that what you want from people?
V: Definitely, we’re not in this just for the artist part of it, we’re in it to make a spectacle and make a statement. The more you’re noticed, the more you can achieve that.
AZ: Now the first guy you auditioned and hired was OS. What was it about him, his guitar playing and his fashion sense that made you say, “Hey, he’s my guitar player?”
V: When we auditioned OS, I set up about nine guitar players in one day. When OS came out, it wasn’t necessarily a fashion interview; obviously we wanted to make sure he didn’t have any mutations in the middle of his forehead or anything... So we got these nine guys lined up, they came with their equipment. He was on time, actually early, and brought in a stack of speakers over my head. We got them set up in our rehearsal space. He was one of the few guys who could not only follow the drummer no matter what changes he threw at him, but he also had savvy and experience. He was one of the only guys who actually turned his speakers away from me. I actually sat near the door to see what the auditioned players would do. Most people would play to me and turn all their shit to face me. He was the only one who turned his cabinets to face the drummer so he could hear exactly what was going on musically. That one little thing, besides the fact that he jammed, was pretty much the hint that this was our guy, because he was a thinking musician.
AZ: So how’d you meet this guy Dreg? How’s he fit in?
V: Dreg was introduced to us by a mutual friend. We were having a few issues with our old drummer and it was just, for some reason... it just clicked. I guess you could call it the audition, though I think Dreg didn’t come in with the idea that it was an audition because he brought in his full cage, all his drums, everything, set it up and taped it down. It was like, “Okay, now we’re gonna play.” It was not only that, I mean that was pretty ballsy, pretty confident to move his entire damn kit up for an audition to set it up and leave it there. He pretty much knew. We had talked a little bit before and we had super-similar vision. Then he showed up. Not only did he jam, but it was just, “I’m there.” It was that move that made it seem pretty natural.
Dreg: We had talked before and we had similar vision, I wouldn’t say identical. We both came from similar projects prior to this one. We were both looking for the same thing, and that’s a metal-industrial hybrid. I think, from my perspective, I bring more of the metal background to it. Val brings more the industrial. That’s exactly how we’re getting what we’re getting, and that’s truly metal and industrial.
AZ: So if you had to place your band into a genre, say you go into a record store, where would you find Fashion Bomb?
V: Well if you go to Best Buy it’s under “Pop.” (all laugh)
D: That’s what’s tough. I mean, what is rock? What is metal? What is industrial? I think the best way to describe what we’re doing is industrial-metal. The reason being is almost all industrial is getting linked into the metal category. But a lot of it has electronic drums or two guys playing keyboards and sequencing. We’re actually bringing the guitar, the riff guitar and the acoustic drums, too, with the keyboards and sequencing to the industrial side of it. So if I was going to make a tab, I’d put it in industrial-metal.
AZ: So finally, we have the long-awaited Fashion Bomb EP. Tell us about the recording of that, what went into it, why you picked these five songs?
D: Going back further, the EP started about five months ago. We had two studio visits, I guess you’d say; I’d call them pre-production. It was just six months of us refining our sound and really finding what we wanted to produce and sound like on tape. The last session we went to Ghetto Love Recording, Dale Meiners was the producer. Why we picked the five songs... I think, previously there were two other songs that we had pre-produced and we had to pick what we felt was enough for an EP, five songs. So two of them got cut. They may come out later, we do have them on tape now, so we may remix and put those out at some other time. We just wanted to pick the perfect mix of songs for this particular EP. The titles are Drug Pool, Mold, The Line, Nothing and the cover, which is “Stars.”
AZ: Who did you cover that from?
V: Hum, they were a local Illinois band. I guess they were a one-hit wonder, but they’re real talented. That “Stars” song is really great; a good song and an excellent jam. It’s really not our style of music at all, which is why we wanted to make it a little bit of our own. I would say Hum is more of a prog-rock band.
AZ: Why did you pick that tune?
D: The way I saw it, Val and I have very different musical tastes and musical backgrounds, although we do overlap in a lot of areas. There are many bands that Val would never go see with me and vice versa. Actually we had been going to Fuel every Sunday night and they always played this particular song. We noticed nobody in the place knew who wrote the song, who did the song, but everybody was bobbing their heads, jamming to the song.
V: It is off their album, “You’d Prefer An Astronaut,” and I’ve had the album for a long time. It’s a killer guitar riff in the middle.
AZ: What about “The Line,” the single, what’s that tune about?
V: “The Line” is about, and is like our mission statement for Fashion Bomb. It’s all about looking the way you want, being the way you want, but it’s illustrated by a story I kind of came up with listening to the riff for it we were developing in rehearsal and some of the keyboard parts that Viktor was adding. It was very mechanical sounding. It was almost like a machine. I developed this story in my head as I was hearing the music. Like the line outside if you go to say John Barleycorn on the weekend, or Alumni Club on the weekend. All the guys are wearing khakis, white shirts and loafers. They’re all wearing the same stuff. They’re all in line, almost like they came out of a machine, an assembly line. You can take kids with all the creativity in the world, all the curiosity, a complete clean slate. Then they’re put in a machine, which, not to sound cliche?, is society... and out comes the line. The line is all the same people over and over. That’s why in the lyrics, there’s “processing the line” and everybody thinks they’re building quality by making people the same. But in reality they’re killing the creative spirit. That’s what the song’s about.
AZ: I see it in everyday life, “The Line,” the people you’re talking about will single out somebody like you walking down the street and ridicule the style. But it’s more hilarious to me to be a cookie-cutter and feel that “I have to fit into society so much that I have to look like everybody else.” I think they’re the pathetic ones. Yet, power in numbers and they find it so easy to point the finger and laugh.
V: But you know what, it’s so much of what you see out there that’s killing the ability to say, “Hey you know what, I can look the way I want to. I can be the way I want to. The cookie-cutter people are basically where the inspiration came from. I was actually thinking of the video treatment for it. So we’re working on that as well. That will be our first video.
AZ: You got the name from Orgy didn’t you? Their tune, “Fashion Bomb?”
V: No, actually I’ll tell you what the inspiration for Fashion Bomb was. It was old Eurythmics song. Dave Edmonds and Annie Lennox are two of the coolest people ever, especially as songwriters. They have a song called “Fashion Bomb.” If you read the lyrics, all the lyrics are about the “mission statement” of our band. They acquaint it to a woman and how she’s a fashion bomb and out in the night like a vampire, looking all different yet she’s got her own sense of fashion. She’s a presence. Yeah, I know it’s an unfortunate parallel, I like Orgy, but that’s not where it came from.
AZ: Breakdown the members that made the band.
V: Dreg is probably one of the best drummers I’ve ever played with. I can say that honestly. For instance, in the studio we went in and did two takes of each song and if you could hear one off drum bit, that was unusual. He’s solid, good at writing, musically savvy, a great image. He’s a very welcome right-hand man. If I was the left hand, he’d be the right. That’s what Dreg is. OS is the workhorse of the band. Great riffs, great ideas, he’s always there, always committed. I’m not a guitar player so, his fingers are fast. (laughs) If you need someone to rely on it’s definitely him.
D: I think between me, OS and Val the whole thing is pretty developed. It went a long ways and as a band we were able to pick up Sen and Viktor. We were actually fortunate enough to find Viktor in another band. Viktor was very talented, we went after him. He’s a great programmer, that’s probably his strength. He also adds the industrial keyboards. He’s one of the best programmers in the city.
AZ: Really? In Chicago that’s saying something. And your bass player Sen, how come he can fill in for a girl? (all laugh)
V: Yeah, our original bass player was a girl. There was just a commitment problem. But that aside, we went through a couple of bass players. We worked with a bunch of good ones, but finally when we were auditioning for a permanent bass player we had a couple of good auditions but he came in and really blew us away. He’s the prodigy of the group. It was a whole, long audition process. He was actually the last audition. We actually had a couple of other people in mind because they would come up and lay down some real good bass lines, but Viktor said, “Hey, I have this guy I know, listen to him.” We listened to him and we’re glad we did.
AZ: So I used to see you around all the time, you’d come to some of my shows. What did you do in music? What’s your Chicago rock n’ roll history?
V: There’s a bit. Actually I’m a classically-trained opera singer. I did a lot of that. Onstage for that you really can’t have a lot of long hair and piercing and be waif-ish (laughs). I learned my primary love is this genre, but my training has always been classical. I did some work with some bands that didn’t do too much. I think the big problem is trying to find a band you fit with. That was a big struggle for all the projects I was with in the past. I was a member of some KoRn-esque project in the past that had some rapper in it. It was way before Linkin Park. This was when KoRn first played Metro. We were around that time trying to get into that niche. We couldn’t find personnel that were dedicated enough. Story of my previous experience...
AZ: How about the Cliff Notes version of your rock n’ roll history, Dreg?
D: (laughs) Yeah, I started heroin when I was 9, I don’t really remember anything since then. No, I was in Michigan before I moved to Chicago, five-six years ago. I was in an “alternative” band. We did some heavy, extensive touring in the Midwest. But I moved to Chicago, bounced around, had a couple of close calls on some decent projects but issues, girls, whatever, destroy bands and destroyed every one of those. It was good timing, I was actually on my way out of a project when me and Val were introduced,
AZ: So you’re playing Alc-O-Holiday, what’s on the horizon after that? 2003, what’s happening?
V: We’ve got some band that we’re good friends with and we’re going to plan some shows. Hopefully to bring a little more attention to this genre. We know of a lot of projects in this city that are with that new label Underground Inc., a couple of those bands we know. We want to do a couple of shows with them. Some venues or maybe a short tour in the Midwest somewhere. I think that’s in the works.
AZ: So what’s up with the boots? (Dreg and Val laugh) The tallest band in Chicago.
V: You coined that phrase and now it stuck. Everybody’s commenting on that.
D: Pretty much I just like to go to shows and stand in the back and be able to see.