Dead Rhetoric: Who designed the cover art, and did the album title come to you fairly quickly as well?
Gallagher: That’s always a bone of contention. It’s a pain in the neck getting album titles and covers. When something comes together, it’s usually one thing dominos over something else. So we came up with the title ExtermiNation – which comes from the ‘exterminate’ refrain in the song “Destroy All Monsters”. That word sticks out, and then Mark came up with extermination, a play on words there. We had various cover ideas which were horrible, and then I came up with the idea of a mad scientist injecting the Earth with some kind of crazy venom. Don’t ask me why, but I did. Then a friend of ours Jay Sharpe who is a graphic designer asked if he could take that ball and roll with it- we said sure, go for it. It came out awesome. We’ve had times in the past where that process worked out, and other times we’ve sat there with a blank page with a deadline of it being done by tomorrow, nightmare-ish. It was really cool to have this come together as quick as it did, and early enough in the project that we could lock it down and not have to worry about it.
Dead Rhetoric: Unlike the 80’s where it seemed like a new Raven album hit the streets on an annual yearly basis, you’ve preferred a ‘quality over quantity’ approach in the last couple of decades. Are you as picky in terms of the songwriting and final product today?
Gallagher: Yes, we really are. In the 1980’s, when we did Life’s a Bitch, we went in the studio with basically nothing and were in a rehearsal room for two weeks and came up with the album. We can do that and come up with good stuff that way, but it’s also good to write things and be able to walk away from it. Forget about it, listen back a week later, see where you are and have more of a reflective approach. You can build it up, get it the way you want it- then go in and record it. Versus the manic energy. The business model has changed, everyone in the old days wanted an album every year. Right now it’s like – the market is just not the same. People are starting to buy vinyl again but not a lot of people are buying CD’s, the whole downloading thing destroyed the whole business model completely. So you want to try and build up expectations and make it an event rather than the way… look at somebody like Elton John. He is an amazing artist but back in the early days he would have a new album out every six months. That’s insane to think of that. It’s better for us to have a really good product that we are really happy with and this is the way we did Walk Through Fire, we took our time. I think Everything Louder was done in four weekends from scratch. We threw it together, boom boom – there it is. I think it’s better now to distill things down, refine it and make sure you have things exactly the way you want in the planning stages, it makes a huge difference.
Dead Rhetoric: How much damage did the early Atlantic albums of the 80’s with Stay Hard and The Pack Is Back do to Raven’s career? I for one applauded the decision to stick to your guns on the subsequent Mad EP as well as Life’s a Bitch to not chase down the commercial audience and play from your guts and hearts again…
Gallagher: I don’t think we got too much grief over Stay Hard. It was pretty much the natural progression from All For One. In fact “Power and the Glory” was going to be on All For One, we just had one song too many so we re-recorded that for Stay Hard. The Pack Is Back was a bit more radical in that it was done to a click track, which is the way Rob (‘Wacko’ Hunter – former drummer) wanted it, and it was wrong from the get go. The producer Eddie Kramer had based his whole career off of recording bands live in the studio with a live feel, and we made basically a techno album, and that wasn’t where our heads were at. You mix in the commercial angle, some of the stuff worked and (some) didn’t. The cover was controversial as we looked like a bunch of demented hairdressers or something. So that hurt – but live it didn’t make a difference as we were still as crazy, heavy, and loud as ever. And then of course things changed- you were either going to be the hair farmers or the dirty, filthy thrash metallers – and to be honest we fell kind of in the middle. We even did a tour with W.A.S.P. and Slayer – so there are your two extremes pretty much right there.
We regrouped after The Pack Is Back and then the record company didn’t want to support of all this – so sod everybody, we did what we wanted to do – and we’ve been that way ever since.
Dead Rhetoric: How chaotic of a shoot was the Ultimate Revenge 2 video that you did with Forbidden, Faith or Fear, Death, and Dark Angel back in 1989 at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, PA? I remember reading certain reviews that talked about a woman doing a perfect back flip off the stage and I can guess the pit/crowd surfing action was killer…
Gallagher: It was chaotic for many reasons. We wanted to do a video, and we were told ‘well we will do this Ultimate Revenge 2 thing’. So we said alright… if I remember correctly we were rehearsing for a tour and we travelled down from upstate New York to Philadelphia, got in late and we were sent to the wrong hotels by the guys from Combat Records. They forgot what rooms we were in, so the doors got banged on at 11 o’clock in the morning. ‘What are you guys doing, we are doing a soundcheck now’ and nobody told us any of this was going on. Oh great, we get driven out and confronted by all the other bands standing there, glaring at us thinking that we are a bunch of assholes. One of the channels on the board wasn’t working, he had to pull it apart to make it work, we got the sounds together, had to refocus the lights and the musicians in these other bands thought we were being prima donnas- which pissed us off even more. When all of this was done, we wanted to eat- and there was no food left. So by the time we went on, we were raging mad. Which made for a decent performance. Of course the reviews were the other bands were wonderful, we saw reviewers in photographs who were drunk and unconscious on the floor. How did he review our show? (laughs) You put it down to experience, but due to surreptitious means we have the master tapes, nobody else does. Overall it wasn’t too bad, but very much a bonding moment as Joe had just joined the band and it was the three of us against the world.
Part II of Matt Coe’s interview with John Gallagher will post tomorrow night, April 20th.