An Interview with Leo Moran of the Saw Doctors (March 14, 2004)

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I am reprinting this interview that originally appeared in somewhat different form on The Green Man Review. Copyright 2004. Reprinted with permission.

Working at The Green Man Review has made me aware of many different types of music I had previously missed, and my favorite of all the bands to which I have been introduced through reviewing is the Saw Doctors. Ever since I heard Play It Again, Sham!, it has never left the couple dozen or so discs that are in my constant rotation. This band from Tuam, Ireland, have managed to take their influences from their home country and from American rock and make their songs universal, while writing solely of their own experiences.

"We've never had a problem about the songs being too local," said Leo Moran in a recent phone conversation conducted during the annual spring leg of their American tour. "People often ask that question. We just hopefully write things about our own lives, and people can draw parallels and see themselves in some of the songs." And they have a sense of humor, which always helps.

When the new CD/DVD release, Live in Galway, became available, I jumped at the chance to hear/watch them, especially since until that point I wasn't familiar with their more popular songs like "N17" and "I Useta Lover" — two of Ireland's biggest selling singles ever (and I call myself a fan!). The American leg of the tour began with a CD launch party in Manhattan on March 10th.

The expression, "If it's March, it must be the Saw Doctors" doesn't seem entirely out of place, as — according to a separate interview included on the Live in Galway DVD — the band has been asked back repeatedly to play the States during the month of the year most closely associated with Irish culture.

I answered the phone on the afternoon before their Chicago concert to greetings from tour manager Niall Barrett. While confirming my credentials, he requested I not keep Leo on the phone too long, as he had a sound check to make soon. I assured him that this would not be a problem. After a moment's conversation, he went to fetch Moran, who co-fronts the band along with Davy Carton.

This early in the tour, Leo expressed fatigue due to the hectic schedule. "It's a bit exhausting at the moment because we just arrived in J.F.K. on Tuesday and then Wednesday we had the CD/DVD launch in Manhattan. Then we got on the boat and Thursday night we did Detroit and upstate New York, and then we drove across to Cleveland. We were a bit tired because the stamina and the time zone change hadn't completely clicked in, but I think it's fairly clicking in now today."

What a schedule! Maybe I should have been concerned that they wouldn't make it a few more days until I could see them in Boston. But I wasn't, and they did arrive (in the middle of a typically rough New England snowstorm) and still put on a great show.

I started with the obvious questions about the new releases: Why release a live album now?

"It just happened now. People have been asking us to do a live album and DVD for a long time, and we were always kind of putting it off. We'd recorded a lot of shows over the years and done well, but not nearly good enough. Maybe we're not ready to release a live album, and maybe we should never release a live album because it wouldn't really capture what people want to bring home from the show.

"Then, a man who made a documentary for us in 1991 called Steven Lock — the documentary was called Sing a Powerful Song — he decided he wanted to make a follow-up TV documentary, that we would go down to Clare Island on the boat and play around at home and at the pub and rehearsing and all that good stuff. We were just thinking when we were out there that we should go out there more often. It was great to have the excuse to go out there, and we'll have to find another excuse to go out in the future.

"Part of what he wanted was to film two shows at Galway in July. So, they filmed with six cameras, and a lighting man called Tom Kenny who was a friend of ours — he normally did the Who and Eric Clapton and MTV stuff and all that — worked under the table. We couldn't really pay him to do the kind of show we were doing. We just had to hope that it turned out well and that it got recorded.

"We did two nights. The first night, we thought was very good and we were very happy with it, and we went away thinking that if it doesn't work out the second night, at least we have enough to get away with. Luckily enough, then we did the second night, and it was actually better, and we ended up using all the second night. We were very lucky, really, and I think an element in that was that the pressure was off. We didn't have to worry any more about it.

"So we ended up having two shows completely recorded, audially and visually. That became the DVD, with 70 minutes of the concert and the hour of the documentary, and automatically we had a live CD album. It all kind of fell into place, and there was a natural enough rhythm about it, and you don't argue with that, really."

Both Moran and Carton sing and play guitar, with Carton singing lead on most of the songs and Moran tackling the majority of the lead guitar duties. Both are founding members of the Saw Doctors and met after Davy Carton's previous band, Blaze X, split up. I asked Leo about their history.

"This band was absolutely fantastic," Leo remembered. "It was like an Irish version of the Ramones." He was a huge fan of the band and regretted their breakup. "I knew that there were all these songs hanging around that Davy had, and that Paul Cunniffe (who, unfortunately, passed away in 2001) had written, and that nobody was maybe ever going to hear them. I just thought it would've been a shame.... So, I started going up to Davy's house on weekends and we eventually tried to put a little band together.... The songs, thankfully, were songs that people did want to hear, and the ones that we wrote subsequently were ones that people wanted to hear as well."

The band that was to become the Saw Doctors almost seems to have been fated. Another founding member (the band's percussionist, Padraig Stevens) was Blaze X's manager. "He had been writing songs, and we started writing songs together, and it just started to work. It was one of those things," Leo continued. "I had been in bands before that were good bands, and it always felt like we were pushing hard at making something happen. But when the format of the Saw Doctors got on stage, it was easy." He referred to the combination of talents as "magic" and concluded, "If it happens once in your life, you're lucky."

When I mentioned that the easygoing atmosphere really comes across in the music, he agreed, "It's the songs that do the work, really."

What got him into performing originally? "I got such pleasure out of listening to other people's songs and records and going to shows. I suppose you just think that what they're doing — what they're sharing about themselves — is such a positive thing ... that it'd be great if you could do the same yourself. And it's a bit of a dream come true, really."

A dream come true? So is he happy with the level of success the band has achieved? "When we started writing songs and started putting the Saw Doctors band together, we could never have imagined that we'd have 37 U.S. tours under our belt in twelve years' time or whatever. It's hard to believe.... It's an amazing success, really, for anybody whose hobby becomes their livelihood."

Since most of the songs are credited to both Carton and Moran, I wondered if he and Davy usually wrote together, or if they had a Lennon/McCartney kind of arrangement. Leo laughed and said, "You're putting us up there a little high," but his further description made the songwriting process sound like fun. "I might write a few lines and Davy'll come up with a tune, then he might write a whole song himself or I might have most of a song.... There's all kinds of different combinations. There's no 'usual'. We don't try too hard."

The band's last two albums have recycled earlier material for the sake of their constantly growing audience who may not have had the opportunity to acquire their older recordings, many of which are not available in the U.S., so I asked Leo if he knew when fans might see some new material from the Saw Doctors. Plans are apparently already in the works: "We have to start recording in May and June and get an album ... out before the end of the year. It always goes longer than you hope, but we do know that much."

I'll definitely be looking forward to that new album. But even if it doesn't come out as scheduled [update: The Cure finally came out in 2006], with the level of care that the Saw Doctors put into re-releasing old material, I'm not too concerned. And hey, there's always that new Shambles CD to pick up.

Nine Lives by Aerosmith

It's hard to complain about something free, but somebody put Nine Lives on the swap table at work in the case for 40 Seasons: the Best of Skid Row. So, when I popped it into my car's player, I thought I was going to recapture my "Youth Gone Wild." Instead I got (to quote lyrics from the title track) a "stay of execution."

The last Aerosmith album I paid real money for was Get a Grip because, after "Cryin'" was such a megahit, it seems like every subsequent single has been trying to duplicate the formula. Which means you can identify an intended single in the first five seconds ("Falling in Love [Is Hard on the Knees]" and "Hole in My Soul," for example). This is fortunate because it means you can quickly skip garbage like "Full Circle" ("If I could change the world like a fairy tale, I would drink the love from your Holy Grail" — where's my toothbrush?) and get to the only good things about Nine Lives: the deep tracks hidden in the middle.

It seems that their blatant attempts to give the public what it wants have not hindered their creativity elsewhere. "Nine Lives" opens with kick-ass hard rock nicely reminiscent of Pump (still my favorite Aerosmith album).

Later, the band offers a "Taste of India" with sitar and sweeping strings grounded by the thunderous rhythm section of Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer. "Something's Gotta Give" is a harmonica-centric track that would not have been out of place on Toys in the Attic.

"Ain't That a Bitch" starts out like slow jazz and turns into a groovy power ballad from the "What It Takes" songbook that nonetheless gets a little "Hey Jude"-y with its overstay-its-welcome ending. And "The Farm" is a fun little trifle with terrific orchestral support that would make a great party song (even if the Wizard of Oz clips are more than a little strange).

And ... that's it. The rest of the album is filled out with dreck. "Crash" is a mish-mash of pop-punk and metal that is just confusing. "Kiss Your Past Goodbye" is a weak ballad obviously geared toward tramps and the guys who screw them. "Pink" is an execrable waste of a good groove, spoiled mainly by the fact that the lyrics don't have the guts to be as suggestive as they really want to be. ("Pink is like red but not quite"? They need to take some lessons from AC/DC.)

Worst of all, "Attitude Adjustment" sounds like something that would have even been filler on some mid-'80s hair-metal band like Autograph. And "Fallen Angels" is a failed attempt at meaningful lyrics that falls flat when the song doesn't even know what it means ("Where do fallen angels go? I just don't know.... They keep fallin'") and yet manages to go on for eight minutes before simply fading out.

CDs these days have way too many tracks because people feel like they need to fill out the 80-minute running time to give listeners their money's worth. But Nine Lives has a solid 20 minutes of good music, which is more than a lot of CDs I paid full price for back in the '90s. And isn't that what the programmable feature on your CD player's for, anyhow?

Book Review: John Bonham: A Thunder of Drums by Chris Welch and Geoff Nichols (Led Zeppelin drummer biography and analysis)

This review originally appeared in somewhat different form on The Green Man Review. Copyright 2004. Reprinted with permission.

Ask any aspiring drummer for his influences, and odds are the name John Bonham will appear on his/her top five list. Voted the second most influential drummer ever by Rhythm readers (only Buddy Rich was higher), John "Bonzo" Bonham's effect on modern drumming (especially hard rock and heavy metal) cannot be overestimated. Not bad for a working class bloke from Redditch in a band that was only recording for a decade.

Unfortunately, John Bonham: A Thunder of Drums is only partially successful in capturing that in print. The book is divided into two portions: rock journalist Chris Welch covers the biographical portion while drummer/writer Geoff Nichols analyzes Bonham's style.

Welch is thorough, I'll give him that. He combines research with personal experience to give a full readout of the important events (musically speaking, primarily) in Bonham's life. However, he utilizes such pedestrian prose that his portion is only interesting from an informational standpoint. I can't see myself reading his chapters over again.

Nichols, on the other hand, writes with such passion for the instruments and with such a true appreciation for Bonham's oeuvre that his two chapters of analysis are a joy to read. John Bonham: A Thunder of Drums will be going on my music reference shelf on the basis of his input alone; specifically his coverage of each album individually and his picking out of representative songs on which to focus.

As a fan of Led Zeppelin, I appreciate Welch's depth of research and I feel I learned a lot about Bonham's place in the band's legacy. However, Geoff Nichols' analysis taught me more in the way of Bonham's place in the creation of the band's sound. As a drummer, I find that infinitely more valuable.

Black Ice by AC/DC

There are few things in this crazy world that you can really depend on, but the sound of an AC/DC song is one of them. Since their beginnings in the early 1970s, their sound has changed very little — even through a change of frontmen that, in retrospect, was more drastic than it seemed at the time — except that more modern producers have removed the tinny sound of their early records and replaced it with a deeper one that truly does their music justice.

Now, I'm not saying that AC/DC are the best band ever, but they're certainly one of the most consistent, and Black Ice is just one more example of this. Of the fifteen songs on this, their first studio album since 2000's Stiff Upper Lip (and the first to feature lyrics by vocalist Brian Johnson since 1988's Blow Up Your Video), only a couple are not up to the level of their brethren. The rest of the album is a solid lineup of concert anthems, the kind of rock n roll at which the boys from Australia have always excelled.

Johnson's comment that "we found out what we were good at, and that was rock n roll" may have been what inspired the group this time around, given that there are three songs on Black Ice with "Rock n Roll" in the title (and one called "Rocking All the Way"), including the first single, "Rock n Roll Train," whose chorus actually says "Runaway Train." (But God forbid someone confuse them with Soul Asylum!)

The lyrics have never been the high point on any AC/DC album (except, as stated above, when it comes to their consistency). This time, if anything, they are a bit tamer than usual, with what seems to be much less innuendo (possibly something to do with the album being primarily available through Wal-Mart in the U.S.). But arena-rock songs aren't about intelligent words, anyway, to wit this verse from "Rock n Roll Train":

One hot Southern belle
Son of a devil
A schoolboy spelling bee
A schoolgirl with a fantasy

Those words don't mean anything, but when Johnson wails them, well, you just want to wail right along with him. Luckily, the musicianship on Black Ice is strong enough to carry the album. Though it's the heavy-metal/hard-rock listenership that most fully embraces them, AC/DC has always been, at its heart, a blues-rock band, and several songs bring this right to the front. Witness the riff on "Decibel" that sounds lifted right from Beale Street, with Johnson surprisingly deft at using his lower register vocals in accompaniment.

In fact, most of the second half of Black Ice is saturated in blues rock, and it's so far my favorite portion. Don't get me wrong: I love a good fist-pumping riot as much as the next guy, but there's just something about that white-boy blues that brings it on home for me. There's not enough "Stormy May Day" to go around in my opinion — Angus uses a slide(!) and reminds me of Led Zeppelin's "In My Time of Dying." (Incidentally, "Skies on Fire" reminds me of another Jimmy Page track from his best solo album, Outrider.)

But whatever you think of the band's style, if you're a fan, you'll be enthralled by Black Ice. Even my three-year-old son is already a fan of "the train song" and "Big Jack" (which he thinks is actually about Big Jet from Little Einsteins, and I don't correct him because I think it's cute), so there's another potential fan on the way up. Luckily, the odds are that, by the time he's old enough to pay money for his own albums (in whatever form they're available by then), AC/DC will still be playing the same kind of hard rock grounded by Phil Rudd's journeyman 4/4 beat, Chris Williams's unwavering bass, and Malcolm Young's invisible rhythm — and I'm really glad they are.

Schoenberg and Sibelius: Violin Concertos performed by Hilary Hahn, violin, with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

The sole violin concerto written by composer Jean Sibelius is my single favorite piece of music. I've heard several recordings of it, from Jascha Heifetz (stunning) to Maxim Vengerov (disappointing save for a rousing finale), and any new recording excites me with the possibilities.

Hilary Hahn's recent recording of the Sibelius violin concerto, under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, is nothing less than gorgeous. Her tones are pure, and she extends the slow parts, squeezing every last bit of emotion out of them. Salonen and the orchestra offer commendable support. In contrast, the violinists I've heard before this (all men, if that matters) seemed to be interested more in just hitting all the notes perfectly. Hahn opened a new door for me.

The Schoenberg violin concerto paired on the disc was written using the composer's pioneering dodecaphonic (or 12-tone) technique. Schoenberg himself pronounced it "unplayable" (with pride!), but Hahn gives it the old college try and manages to draw a discernible melody out of the dissonance. This is definitely the more challenging listen of the two pieces, but repeated tries are most definitely rewarded, especially for those interested in the history of modern classical music (Schoenberg is the undisputed progenitor of such phase, so I'm reserving judgment until I can get my head around it properly with a few listens. Also, I have no frame of reference, never having heard it before.

Twenty years ago, Salonen led violinist Cho-Liang Lin in a recording of the Sibelius violin concerto (paired with the violin concerto of Sibelius's fellow countryman Carl Nielsen) that has since become a classic. I have no doubt that this Hahn performance will achieve an equal level of respect over time.