PipemanRadio Discusses the Rebirth of Forbidden

0:04 Hey, you love them too? Sure, I'm wow. Wake up of America. It's time for the adventure. So fight Man on W four cyd com West Palm Beach is number one internet radio station. Here's your host, the White Man. I didn't see it coming, caught me out of nowhere.

0:48 Honestly know, you're fucking crazy if you don't put Forbidden back together, you know. And Norma Skinner's the guy that everybody will know about this time next year. And I got the call in crazy was the question. I mean, it took me about half the second say yes, what are fly shit? It's all gonna come together and these are my voice. This is what it's gonna be. With great respect to any version of Forbidden there was, this is the new version, and this is what it is. This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures of Pipe Man W four cy Radio. And as all of you know, I am definitely a total thrash metal head from way back. So I'm very excited about our next guest because there's a rebirth. I love how that's put and we're going to talk about it of one of a great Bay Area thrashers, Forbidden. And here we have on the show, Craig, how are you. I'm really good. Yeah.

1:44 It was after a very painful, bloody rebirth. You know, I mean it's like given it. It's like passing a kidney stone, you know. So tell me about what is it that prompted or tell the listeners what prompted this rebirth. Well, there's many things, and it was a long slow burn, and I me being the last of us, the last of the five of us that really accepted it, but you know in this order. I mean I got offers every year for the first you know, six seven years that we kind of dissolved in twenty and twelve, and I never really took him seriously because I never wanted to do this without Russ Anderson, Who's my guy. You know, Russ was my he was like a mentor to me when I was fifteen, and you know, he was like twenty one or twenty two when he when he first started Forbidden And yeah, I mean, you know, you just you have the greatest and you don't want to really want to go back. I mean, the guy could do more vocally than anyone on earth practically, So you know, Halford's the only guy that I think was really had that many tools in his in his you know, whatever you want to cause Swiss army knife. So I just didn't see it. You know, he had severe bout with alcoholism. I went and you know, got him like three years ago, basically pulled him off the floor. We all pulled together and got him into a program and he's been sober ever since. So I just didn't ever see it. I just figured it was okay, it was a chapter of my life. Fast forward to this thing we called the Bay Area in interprational here in the Bay Area, ironically Bay Area, but something we you know, the Dynamo Festival out in

3:15 Holland asked me if I would be into doing some sort of tribute for Thrash Metals. So my idea was to do this thing where nobody in the bands played their own song. Everybody has to stand on the side of the stage when their song comes up, be it Death, Angel, Testament, Exodus, Metallica, doesn't matter. You'd have to stand there and it's you know, it's a it's a fluid situation. But we didn't have a singer here locally to put rehearse for there, so I was all of our singers. We had Grandy from Lamb of God, Mark from Death Angel, guys like that, So how Kayton from Hirax was one. They were all somewhere else and I needed a singer, and Chris Kontos was one of the two main drummers, the other one being Mark Hernandez who was in Forbidden. But Chris said, why don't you ask Norman Skinner And I said, oh, yeah, Skinner. He's really good. Yeah, I haven't seen him singing a while, but he's a really cool guy. From what I know, he seems cool. So we had him come in and learned a bunch of songs and just he was nailing them all and as, oh, this is great.

4:11 And then I said, hey, why don't we just run through this Forbidden song and see what it sounds like? And I, you know, I had four of the guys in ron Omega Wave standing with me, right, So we started, and then I realized, why the hell are we doing this? We're not even playing. Nobody that's standing here is going to be playing this in Europe. But I didn't stop. I was just like, all right, we'll just go. Matt starts the bass part and we start, and then Norman comes in and just nails it, the cadence, the power, the just the enthusiasm. I was like, okay, well I heard that, you know. And Chris Kontos was not playing, and he was standing outside and he opened the door real slow and opened his eyes real big and just gave me this look like whoa dude, Like I hear that. I'm like, yeah, I hear that, and we all heard it. Didn't think about it even then. I just thought, well, school, so we go to Europe, we come back, we get ready for the Bay Area edition of this. We had over thirty songs, you know, and I wanted Skinner to be a part of it. I said, dude, you did so well, why don't you play, like, you know, a few songs at this next one. So he ended up singing eight songs, one of them being Childs of Blood with the guys and Warbringer who playing the music. So you know, we had to sit there and watch that. So those guys show up the day before the show rehearse at sir, and I watch them start to play this song and Norman grabbed the mic and nail the scream and then do the entire song. And I felt everyone in the room just looking at me like, okay, dude,

5:42 do you hear this? Do you see I'm like, yes, yes I do, but still I didn't accept it. And then he did the show and it was incredible. Same thing happened times eight hundred people. You know it just everyone's looking at me like do you see this? I'm like, yes, yes, I see it. But I still didn't want to really do it. And it wasn't until we got an email from Alcatraz Festival in Europe and they said, hey, would you know, essentially to a paraphrasing here, would you be interested in doing a thirty fifth anniversary or forbid n Evil Anthraxes dropped off the bill, will slide here in their spot, and would you be interested in doing it with another singer because you know Russ is not well and he's you know, they knew the story about Russ, And would you be interested in having Chris Contos play drums because it's great for the story and these European fans love Machine Head and burned my eyes and I go I just pushed my seatback, looked at my computer and just called my manager and said, I think the universe is telling us something. And that was the first time I really considered that it was a possibility, and you know, I had to reach out to Russ and you know all that stuff and all the guys and talk to them. And it's just been like green light after green light, after quite a few years of yellow, red, yellow, red, green, yellow. You know, it's it's just been overwhelmingly positive. And that's where we are today. And how amazing that's going to be because that's an incredible festival. So how's it going to feel after his

7:15 time go on playing that festival? That's me incredible? Well, Avatraz has grown into quite a festival. It's about twenty five thousand people a day. It's not the biggest one, but it's very music focused and a lot of these festivals get super convoluted with just so much stuff, you know, and too many bands and too many things happening. So I mean, I I don't I can't really tell you how it's going to feel. I've I've done it before. But when Forbidden came around for the first bunch of festivals, you know, there was issues. You know, there was issues. We had internal things that weren't moving us in the right direction, you know, And now that stuff is all out of the way. You know. Alcohol had a big part of it, you know, but there's other stuff, and there's now I have, you know, basically Matt and Steve from my Omegawave lineup, Chris Contents, who I already played with in the Boneless Ones, and I've been friends with Chris forever. You know. That's the thing.

8:11 Let me explain to you about Chris. I did not originally want him as the drummer because I didn't want to risk our friendship. I already played with him in another band. I've been friends with him for thirty five years. I didn't want to like put it on him to have such a monumental amount of pressure on top of my friendship. And I reached out to him and I said, hey, I'm gonna be doing this, said he started suggesting other drummers because he agreed, and mark Er Nettez wasn't doing it because he had actually quit the band in twenty eleven anyway, So you know, for the same similar reasons to Russ. He needed to straighten out of his life. He's not able to just pick up and go and tour for distances. He can't do it. So I was looking you know, and he suggested drummers, and I said, well, I'll get back to you.

8:52 And I talked to some really great guys, really well known prevalent. All wanted to do it. Everyone's out of town, everyone lives somewhere else. They'd have to come in and I just call them once more. As it looked, dude, before I pull the trigger, maybe we should examine this once more. You live here, we're great friends. I love you, I love working with you. You know I want to I would love to write with you because I know how it is writing and reconsider and then he's like, dude, let's just do it. Let's go. And that's how this lineup came together. Nice And so now that was after Norman. Yeah, now that we have this, is there talks of beyond Alcatraz? Yeah, no, there is. And I have a plan and the plan is really simple, and it becomes even more simple with the way the industry is today, how difficult it is, the tour, how expensive, how you know. My plan is to just do special things and make it worthwhile.

9:52 And that means that you know, we'll have this Alcatraz Festival, will do something in the Bay Area before the year heads. But I'm going to really concentrate on writing music with these guys and conceptualizing what I want to write about. And you know, I wrote like the majority of the lyrics anyway, so that part of it. I'll work closely with Norman Skinner, and you know, he wants to learn the way I do things. I wanted to say formula, but it's not really a formula because I change it up. But yeah, so, I mean there's like a lot of enthusiasm to create something great. So that's the first thing I want to really get into and probably won't even record that record till the you know, before the middle of next year, probably before festival season begins. Well, you know, you made some points there that I actually dig is that you're going to play and do special things, you know, because I think sometimes it makes it better and it makes you better I think as a musician if you're not like doing the same thing all the time, and you know, it creates the excitement passion in my opinion, yeah, mine too. And we all have the luxury of hindsight if you care to look at it really clearly, right, I mean, you can see the way it's working for other bands and it's it's very tough. You know. There's a lot of tours that just beat the pavement and beat the pavement and beat the pavement. And I think that by the time they've beaten the pavement three or four times and it's the same pavement, people are just like, okay, you know, I mean, I would love to play everywhere, but that's just not feasible anymore. It's

11:28 just not it's not like, you know, a business plan that works. It's just very expensive, you know, and people want you to do all this that and the other. They It's funny because people want, you know, people, people want the exact thing that they remember. They want how they remembered it. They wanted it just the way it was. And in reality, if that was the case, everything would stay the same all the time, right, Yeah, you know, things happen. I think musicians like yourself too, sometimes get tired of that. And let me explain that, you know what you're saying as somebody myself old school thrashmail ahead from the early eighties in LA and then you know, I used to take Greyhound buses up to the Bay Area when everybody left LA. And you know it, when you're that person you kind of think, oh, I still want that, you know, I want that first album, I want the first this.

12:22 But as a musician, you want to grow and evolve and you don't want to do the same thing over and over again for thirty years. Yeah, there's there. Well, there's different kinds of people, right, I mean, who are you trying to please? You know, you try to please the kind of person that wants everything rigidly the same, so they have their comfort level and they the same nostalgia button gets pushed. Are you trying to please the person that wants, you know, new and exciting and challenging things, or are you trying to please yourself and then it just works out? You know? That's that's where we are. I mean, there's but that being said, and I do need to say this when we do go to your and when you know, anything we would do this year is going to really focus on forbid Enevil. It's been thirty five years. I think we owe the people that album and it's entire to you. Maybe not in that order, you know, but we will play the entire album. And I also think I want to play well, actually I know I want to play it in the original key was written in which is EA, and nobody plays an anymore. Everybody's at least a half step or step or lower, so the old songs don't quite sound the same. But I wanted to bounce.

13:28 I wanted to have that old rubber band thrash bounce that he used to have. Love it, love it, and it's going to be bad asset Alcatraz and everything else you got going on. Tell everybody how they can connect with you, guys, whether it be social media, the web, or however you want them to connect with you so that we can get this rebirth going. Sure, Matt, you know it's really easy to join in and join up and sign up, and you know we have a website with our all of our merch and we'll be getting all the updates up on the website. We just revamped that whole thing. It's going to be very websites are almost dead too, but at least you can buy all the official Forbidden merchandise there. So that's official Forbidden dot com and then official Forbidden on Instagram we just created the week before we put the news. I never did anything with Instagram because there was no band to do it. And now you know, we have a quick two and a half thousand people that jumped in there, but we need that to get a lot bigger sets. Official Underscore Forbidden on Instagram and then just forbidden on the Facebook. It's easy to find, you know. Yeah, we're that. We're not that difficult to find, and you can always reach out to us. You can message us and will likely answer. Chris Kontos is extremely good with the public and things like that too.

14:46 You know, he's always he always has been. So we're there. You know, we're not We're not some aloof disjointed bunch of disconnected you know, whatever you want to call them. We're pretty available and accessible. Nice. Well, I can't wait to see what else comes down the pike here. You guys are badass, and I hope everybody not only connects with you on social media but buys your merch because that's the only way bands survive nowadays. So I always tell everybody they need to support bands by buying their merch. Well, we got great merch. And you know it's a funny is the guy who runs my merch for me is Roblinn for machine Head because he's got his merchandise company and he does the very best screening and color separation jobs that of anyone I've ever worked with. So forbidne Evil looks like forbidne Evil.

15:35 It's not some off colored you know. It's the exact album cover. Saying with Twisted in the forum. And we have some other custom stuff on the side too. Got schous of Blood shirt, got to throw Eyes a glass shirt, got a Forbidden demo shirt, we got Twisted the Form hoodies, we got forbidene Evil hoodies. Nice well. Thanks for making such great music for so many, so many years, and thanks for doing this rebirth because I think it's and be amazing. And thanks for being on the Adventures Paintment no problem being it's a pleasure, my pleasure. Thank you for listening to the Adventures of Paintman. I'm W four CUI Radio