Bernard Allison

“My dad told me to never be a copy cat,” emphasized guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Bernard Allison in a recent telephone interview. “He told me, ‘you’ll have influences and idols, but you’ll need to put yourself into what you play.’” Allison, son of late titan Luther Allison, has taken his father’s message to heart in a career that reaches back more than 15 years. “I’m doing what I’ve always done – mix a 12-bar blues tune with a couple of rock tunes, and a couple of funk tunes.”

Contrary to many perceptions, the senior Allison was not the foremost musical teacher in Bernard’s early career. “There wasn’t that much teaching at the musical level,” Allison said. “I taught myself how to play guitar and sing pretty much on my own, although he showed me how to play a few things. But Our relation was more like brothers than father/son.” Bernard did note that his father gave him sage advice on other aspects of the business, however. “He did teach me about the road – but I also learned a lot from my 3 years with Koko Taylor.” That apprenticeship with Taylor, and later with Willie Dixon’s Blues All-Stars, saw the teenage Allison emerge with more of his own voice, further developed through tutoring by Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughan. So zealots who expect – or hope – that Bernard will develop into a clone of his father will be disappointed. “A lot of our music is naturally the same,” Allison said.  “Early on, there was a lot more stuff where I sounded like him. But now, you can hear a song and tell if it’s Bernard or Luther.”

Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown

an historic interview of this legend of the blues and grammy winner, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. Brown passed away in 2006. RIP Gatemouth

Black Label Society

There’s nothing subtle about Zakk Wylde. He’s the guitar demon that laid the sinister soundtrack to Ozzy Osbourne’s No Rest for the Wicked and No More Tears, breathing insanity into “Crazy Babies,” ripping through “Demon Alcohol” and raising hell on earth with “Tattooed Dancer.” He wore his Southern pride on his sleeve with Pride & Glory, enjoying fleeting success with the project, but not completely satisfying his hunger to rock with reckless abandonment. From there he split songwriting time between Osbourne’s Ozzmosis album and Guns N’ Roses, in the process, recording his solo-acoustic Book of Shadows, an album that made for an interesting sidebar for the shredding metal phenom, but only intensified his desire to raise Caine with six-string, Sabbath-inspired salutations.

When writing with GN’R seemed a dead-end road, Wylde had a revelation—he’d sing the songs himself, give them his own voice, and create a band that fulfilled his vision of rock’s most brutal attributes. He dubbed the band Black Label Society

Disturbed

It takes all musical shapes and styles to fill out an OZZfest lineup, and this summer’s run is no exception—The hip-hop stylings of Tommy Lee’s post Mötley Crüe/Methods of Mayhem bounce into the industrial-metal synchopations of Static-X, which clamor into the hard rocking depths of Godsmack . And then there’s the full-on metal bombast of Pantera.

If you have the stamina, that offers a hell of a day at the mainstage, but this is America in the year 2000. In an age of instant gratification, why settle for four bands when there’s a band on the sidestage that offers everything each of those bands has to offer, and more. That’s big talk about a band that’s not even halfway to a gold record (selling 500,000 copies) with their Giant Records debut The Sickness, especially when comparing them to four bands that have sold more than 10.0 million albums between them. But Disturbed are that good. Quite honestly, they’re even better.

Rebels Without Applause

“It doesn’t matter, we just do what we do.” Day after day, year after year, this has become the motto of guitarist Greg Fulton, singer and songwriter for the explosive metal outfit Rebels Without Applause.  Weathering a rotating line-up of musicians that made up the speed and thrash metal projects Znowhite and Cyclone Temple, Greg, along with bassist Scott Schafer, has seen metal firsthand since 1986.  From opening up for Vanilla Ice to experiencing record label runarounds, the Chicago natives have withstood the trials of regular commutes to play New York clubs and confronting the black man playing white music complex.  From holding down multiple part-time jobs to pretending to be the band’s manager only to hear how that guitarist has got a real attitude, Greg has seen more than his fair share of music’s peculiar brand of justice.

“A lot of people think when they join a band it’s a short trip from their day jobs to the tour bus.”  Having already gone through a string of lead singers Greg was not eager to deal with teaching someone else how he wanted them to sing his songs.  Greg would sing his songs into a tape machine to show how he wanted his songs to be sung, but he never thought his voice was up to snuff.  With friend and former Cyclone Temple guitar tech, Mark Alano, working alongside Greg’s blast furnace fretwork, RWA’s two-guitar assault allows Greg plenty of space to play front man.  A soul-inspired delivery smothered in machine tooled rhythms, Greg’s evangelical vocals are thunderbolts in a raging storm.

Stone Temple Pilots

an interview with Stone Temple Pilots’ vocalist Scott Weiland who talks about touring, Pearl Jam similarities from their early days, Bad-asses, porn stars, strippers, Limp Bizkit and the Doors