Launchpad

“Some of the best original music today comes from high school garage bands.” –Les Paul

The Wisconsin School Music Association (WSMA) is about to kick off the seventh year of the one of a kind music competition called Launchpad, using the same idea that the late great Les Paul personified in his quote. Launchpad is a statewide alternative music competition for high school students in bands formed outside of the traditional music classroom. Maximum Ink caught up with director and creator of the competition, Dennis Graham to talk about how the competition got started and where he sees it heading in the coming years.

Maximum Ink: Tell us about how Launchpad got started.

Dennis Graham: I was approached by the WSMA, which presents this program, seven years ago to talk about raising awareness on raising funds for them. As a result of my discussions with Michael George, the current Executive Director of the WSMA, and I brought up a couple ideas and the first was to present a Lifetime Achievement Award to recognize people who had a successful music career and were also impacted by a music teacher. The first ever Lifetime Achievement Award in Wisconsin was given to Les Paul. I hand delivered a letter that I wrote, which was signed by Governor Doyle, to Les inviting him back to Wisconsin (He hadn’t been back in twenty years.) October 27th, 2004 was Les Paul Day in the State of Wisconsin and it was just a marvelous day of honoring him. Steve Miller (Steve Miller Band), Les’ godson, came out and was part of it as well.

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Brandon Perry

French Canadian, Brandon Perry is best known for his work as a Chef in the culinary arts. Not one to be limited to just one profession,he is also an author(his latest book is due out soon featuring Eerie Von from Danzig, Calabrese, and Tom Sullivan from Evil dead series fame),and is(to my knowledge) the world’s first chef to also be part of not one but four bands. Brandon is for the most part a solo artist as he provides most of the music in those..himself. Jazzvanguard, is a jazz band with Perry, technical metal drummer playing Jazz. The Resurrected is a technical death metal band he plays in as well(providing bass,drums, and keyboards, while his vocalist lays down the lyrics). He can also be found in the gore metal band Desgustipation and the newly formed(with a girl in Japan), black metal band, Screams of the Dead. Since it isn’t every day you find a celebrity chef that can as he himself puts it, “can still get down and dirty with my death metal”, who loves doing music because others said he couldn’t. I had to take a moment to pick his brain so to speak.

Maximum Ink: Do you find it challenging to have three, possibly four bands going at the same time as your career as a chef?
Brandon Perry: No, not really, we aren’t a super big touring band where that’s how we make our living and have no other careers, I mean I think we all see that if lost our real jobs we would be all fucked up and shit, and starve to death, metal bands that make money are corporate metal bands they are sellouts and that’s that, we don’t sell out, never will, and never have to.

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Soulfly

Max Cavalera is a name that is synonymous with metal music. Name basically any type of metal and Cavalera has not only done work in that type of metal, but perfected it. His music has transcended decades of an ever changing music industry, where it seems like what is deemed as metal changes each and every day. And here we are, in his third decade of being in the metal business, and Cavalera and Soulfly are about to release their heaviest metal ever. “Enslaved” is about all the crazy shit that has happened in our world in the past century. Maximum Ink’s Aaron Manogue sat down with Max Cavalera to talk about Soulfly’s new record “Enslaved”, having his son tour South America with him, and what it was like having Dez Ferrara of Devildriver do some guest vocals on the record.

Maximum Ink: Tell me about your first single and the song you just released “World Scum.” When I first heard it, it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s so dark and just musically raw but it’s weaved together so perfectly it works great.
Max Cavalera: It all started with a death metal riff that I wrote that and it’s really cool. It’s kind of a Possessed and Dark Angel kind of style which really grew into a great song with the lyrics that talk about the last hundred years. All the fucked up shit that’s happened in the world like Auschwitz and the gas chambers, J.F.K. getting shot and that conspiracy, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assassination of Czar Alexander II, all of that. Then the last scene is the final battle between Jesus and the anti-Christ in Israel. It’s kind of a concept song about the history of the last hundred years, the Bloody Century as I call it in the song.

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