Sex, Drugs, and Proactive Heavy Metal – An Interview with Edsel Dope of Dope
This is an exciting time for anyone addicted to Dope. Not the illegal substance, Dope; but the band.
As Dope’s gearing up to release their fifth studio album, No Regrets, on March 10, front man Edsel Dope is concurrently producing an album for another act whilst also getting ready to jump back on the rock and roll highway for a new tour. But it’s a pace and a challenge that Edsel Dope is undeniably up for.
“Yeah, a little hectic, you know? Big business of hurry up and wait so now we’re hurrying up because we’re behind. So yeah it’s a little nutty but everything’s exciting and good. The album’s all done; I just had to put together the instrumentals because they need the clean version of everything for iTunes. And I’m in the middle of producing another record right now, a band called Dirge that’s from Chicago that we just got signed. And we’ve got to finish that record up before we hit the road. It’s just a hectic time but it’s all good – better than not being busy.”
The road that Dope will be traveling will be with Black Label Society and Sevendust.
“We’ve known Zakk [Wylde] for many years. We’ve bumped into him along the way many a times but we first got to play with BLS about a year or so ago and it went fantastic and everybody was so gracious to us. And it was a great opportunity to have Zakk play on the new record and then offer us the opportunity to come out and be part of this big spring tour across America, going back to Canada – we haven’t been there in a long time. We’re excited to hit a bunch of places that we haven’t been. We’ve been kind of keeping it steady in the Midwest here even when we aren’t on big tours we’ve been consistently playing to all of our hot markets but it’s been awhile since we’ve been to a lot of these places we’re going with Zakk so we’re excited to get back.”
“Addiction” is the new Dope song which features a Zakk Wylde guitar solo. Was it a conscious effort for Wylde to play on that particular song?
“No, it was just kind of how it went. We’ve been talking to him and knew that he was psyched about doing something with us. And we were just looking at the body of work and where it was at the time. ‘Addiction’ was just feeling like that kind of groove – that kind of tempo. And I loved where the lyrical content was going. The song of course wasn’t done, but we had the chorus hook and we knew what we were trying to do and I just felt it would be a great song for him to be part of – it’s just the essence of sex, drugs, and heavy metal, you know?”
Was there any concern at all when presenting the song to Wylde that he might not be into it?
“No, because I figured that if he didn’t dig it he would just say, ‘I don’t like this song, send me another one,’ you know? I figured he was down enough with us and what we do that if for some reason he wasn’t into the track that I asked him to play on he would respectfully decline,” chuckles Dope. “But no, he jumped right on it, dug it, and it came out great.”
And the goal behind the record as a whole this time around was to ‘smarten things up’ a bit.
“Yeah, I think it still sounds like a Dope record but I think watching a lot of bands come along the last few years – we started to hint at it on the last record but it’s been three years, and in that time things have continued to progress with Guitar Hero, and bands like DragonForce and Trivium and all these really good guitar driving bands that really embrace showing off their guitar players, it really excited us to do that because that’s something that we hadn’t really done yet is let our guitar player go nuts and show off a little bit. So I think the new album has the traditional Dope swagger and grooves that are fairly easy to grasp but there’s a lot of candy in it now; there’s a lot of little tricks and turn-around and slick parts that our guitar player was able to show off on which sets it apart from some of our previous work. There’s a lot of really good guitar solos.”
The band Dope, in its current state, is an eclectic combination of old and new; did the new members of the band at all help to influence the newer sound?
“Not really. My guitarist [Virus] has been with me for almost eight years now; he’s been with me since our second record. Me and him have really got a good handle on what we want to do. The bass player of the band [Tripp ‘Lee’ Tribbett] is my best friend for years and I picked him up from his other band that I used to produce. He was in a band called Twisted Method, we toured with them a whole bunch, and he certainly contributed just in a creative process of being in the room and helping to push ideas here and there. But really, me and Virus continued with the same approach that we’ve always taken – where we kind of do all work and then the other guys come in and put their two-cents in it.”
Singer, drummer, producer – Edsel Dope is naturally the type of person well equipped to ‘doing all the work,’ after all, this multi-talented musician is self-taught.
“Yeah, I’m just a jack of many, a master of nothing,” Dope jokes. “I started out playing drums when I was a kid and really wound up singing in my first band – which was Dope – by default. I never really thought that I would but I kind of have a strong personality and I have a real hard time following somebody. If you put a singer in your band you have to put a lot of faith and a lot of responsibly in that guy’s hands and so I just sort of wound up in that position by default. Certainly not the greatest singer ever – never claimed to be, but I get the job done.”
So is Edsel Dope a little bit of a control freak where his music is concerned?
“Yeah, I mean it’s not necessarily that as much as I think it’s the vision and the work ethic too. People, I’m sure, get it more now than ever that it’s a business as much as it’s an art, and it’s not just the business side of things either as it’s the work ethic and the passion and the dedication. I don’t put in, generally, as little as most people do, I go above and beyond and because of that it would be very hard for me to have somebody else be the identity of my band. As you can tell, over the years I’ve gone through several members – sometimes it’s creative, sometimes it’s personality, but what ever it is it’s because it’s my band and I’m always able to go where I want to go and do what I want to do, and if you’re with me cool – come on, and if you’re not down with it anymore then cool – nice knowing you. It’s hard to do that with a singer – so that’s sort of the path that I took.”
Dope continues: “I’m a decent guitar player, a decent bass player, decent drummer, decent singer, but I can run the shit and I know how to rock a room, and I think that’s what’s kept us around more than anything is our live show and our ability to go out and just entertain people and have a good time. I think a lot of people take this a little too seriously, in the artistic sense, for my taste. We like to make records that have subject matters and emotions that are important to us but at the end of the day when it comes to performing live I don’t think we’re there to have some big earth-moving experience. It’s 2009, people are just looking to get the fuck away from all the serious shit in their lives for awhile, and that’s what we try to serve as our purpose, to get people away from all the nonsense in their lives and cut loose for a little while and party. And even though some of the music is serious I think in the confines of a Dope concert people get what they’re looking for which is that escape from normal reality for a little while.”
And with the economy being in the dumps and with the music industry in upheaval, there’s a renewed focus on the live performance aspect of the music business.
“Yeah, it’s obviously one of the only ways that you can really go out there and have some control of what’s going to happen to you. You can hope all day long that you’re going to have a hit song but guess what? You’re probably not gonna. But at least you can go out there and play every night and reach people. We’ve been doing that for years, generally playing to our crowd consistently, and that’s why this opportunity to go out with Black Label Society and Sevendust is really exciting for us because it’s been a long time since we’ve been out there supporting and playing to people who might not be familiar with us or at least with our current music. Most people have a knowledge of who Dope is but I think a lot of people can use a reintroduction.”
One of the few professional musicians to actually take a positive stance on the changes within the music industry, Edsel Dope believes that the changes in the music business will sort of force musicians to be more proactive and if not, it’ll somewhat level out the playing field.
“The irony of this is that I’m not a very glass-is-half-full kind of guy, I think I’m very half-empty. It really comes down to do you want to play music or not? And if you do you really have to accept what’s going on and realize that the business is in a transitional phase, and if you want to do this for a living and you want to do this as a big part of your life you have to adapt to it. I’m not Gene Simmons, I don’t have 20-zillion dollars, so for me I have to look at it differently – I have to look at it like, well, if I expect for the business to run the way it did five years ago then I’m going to be out of a job. So I expect it to run differently so I’m going to have to adapt and run my business differently to continue to function and expand as well, but again, it’s all in how you look at it. There’s a lot less money being spent to buy people opportunities. Back in the 90’s, and obviously well before that, a lot of an act’s success could be based on how much money was spent on it. And that’s still true to a degree but there’s more room for people to make noise on their own, and by doing so attracting the attention of the labels or the people who can help take you to the next level than you’ve ever been able to do. It’s almost like that’s really what’s going on now, labels aren’t really signing and developing acts, they’re sort of watching the proactive artists that are developing themselves and providing on their own and then they’re going in and creating deals with those people – and the beauty of that is that if you’ve got something that has value and somebody’s coming to talk to you about that, you’re in a much better bargaining position than if you have something that has very little value and you’re going to someone and asking them to help build it for you. You have a lot less power in that relationship. And in that regard it goes to the point of the record labels not really getting to the table really early on things, they’re letting artists do their own thing and realizing, ‘Oh look, this is catching it’s got so many plays on MySpace and there’s a song on the radio in this market and that market and they’re doing all that without us? Wow, we’d better get involved.’ Or, ‘Well, we don’t understand, it doesn’t sound like Nickelback…Yeah but there must be something we don’t understand because the kids are buying it,’ so on and so forth. So there’s a lot of room for that right now and it’s not so bad to be an independent artist. It’s still frightening which ever way you look at it because it’s 2009 and the economy sucks but back then if you weren’t on a major label you were not getting on the radio, and getting on the radio was the only way to get any attention; those things have changed a little bit. But again, there’s still people that view it exactly the same way – there are a lot of people who are unwilling to view it differently because they want it to be what it was, and if it’s not going to be what it was then it’s not worth their time. That’s cool, it’s worth my time.”
And avenues that are now available to musicians, like MySpace and YouTube, can be both a blessing and a curse.
“Sure, it certainly devalues the content because it gives people a lot less motivation to go out there and buy it, but again, you know I’m not in the record business I’m in the music business – I’d prefer that people buy my record because I’d like to get paid for the hard work of making the record, but I’m far more interested in people coming out and seeing the live show and buying shirts and sort of subscribing to the life style. Bands now a days, I think, are almost like a club – there’s so much out there for somebody to actually drop their money on it and get invested into a band you’ve got to give them a little bit more. You have to be a little bit more important to them. People’s attention spans are really short. Sure, I’d love to have 20-million fans, that would be really cool, it sounds like a blast – but at the same time I’m more interested in having fans that are really down to take the ride; that’ll stick around for two more years while you’re making another record because they know when you come out with it it’s going to be hot and you’re going to deliver a great record with great artwork and you’re going to have great tours and great shows and you continue to deliver what it is that they’ve grown to like about your band. That’s what I subscribe to and I think it works and it’s helped us to have a career as opposed to making a couple of records and going away when the business and the timing of what we were doing faded. We’ve been very fortunate; at this point it’s really hard for me not to call this a career. Over ten years and five records and producing other bands and not having a day-job for going on fifteen years of my life, I don’t think I’ll be doing anything else five years from now so I certainly have to adapt and continue to grow within the business.”
With the economy being in the crippled state that it is, will it cause any changes to how this tour is handled as opposed to past tours in less trying times?
“Absolutely. And the worse was last year when we were touring with those fuel prices where they were, it was insane. But yeah, you feel it all the way around. But again, what we pride it on is touring, and I think where people are going to scrimp unfortunately is buying records because generally you can get the record for free if you want so a lot of people take the mindset of, ‘Well I’m not going to buy the record but I’m going to go to the show,’ and I have to say I would prefer that people go to the shows and steal the records, then buy the records and not go to the shows. But I’d prefer that they do both,” Dope laughs. “But I’ll take what I can get.”
‘Dope,’ the word not only taken as his own surname but also the name of his band, had significance of another kind at one time as well.
“It was one of those things that just happened – I was working in a bar and everyone was asking me where to get stuff so I would point them to do the dude who had stuff. And I got really sick of my boss one day and I was like, you know what? I should just take this $300-bucks and buy some stuff and put it in smaller quantities and when people ask me where they can get stuff instead of me pointing them to that guy I’ll just pretend to go to the back and I’ll sell it to them and I’ll make money. And I hate to say it because I don’t want to influence anyone to do what I did because the penalties for it are so harsh if you get busted, but it really snowballed so quickly. And it gave me the opportunity to take a much quicker jump from having crappy gear to being able to buy better recording gear and be able to spend money on fliers and build a website, and all the things that I needed to do to begin promoting and marketing my band – it would have taken me far longer slaving away and following the rules. So, at the end of the day I took the ultimate risk for my art which may not have been the smartest thing at the time - but when you’re 22 years old and you’re living in New York City and you feel like you have nothing to lose you’re willing to do whatever it takes. But we took a very unorthodox approach, we didn’t play a ton of shows early on we sort of went into the studio and made our demos and really spread our music around the scene with cassette tapes. We created a real underground buzz before we even played shows. So for us what it was, the first show we ever played sold out down the block and it was nuts, and after we played that show and realized that the fan base that we had developed in the underground was real – people were really digging what we were doing – and it was confirmed by how many people came to see the band play. It was scary because the next day you’re heading back out on the street to go do your gig and you have a website up for a band called ‘Dope’ and you just played a show last night and it was sold out and you know a record deal is imminent now but you’re going back out on the street to hustle something that you know you can get in a lot of trouble for – that’s when the stress really started to hit because at that point we began to have something to lose. So that’s what it really comes down to, if you’ve got nothing to lose you don’t really worry about it but as soon as you start to put something together and go ‘Whoa, this is real,’ then it gets a little scary. But we did exactly what we promised ourselves, which was that as soon as we knew we had the record deal we quit hustling and went back to working our crappy bartending jobs, which really weren’t that crappy when I look back at them but I’d certainly rather be doing this.”
So after more than a decade in the music business and with five albums under his belt – what’s the most important thing Edsel Dope has learned?
“Probably humility. And also probably balance. I’ve been doing this so long and I’ve gone through so many different ways about it like being completely obsessed, a workaholic, and just a very unhappy person trying to get too much done. I think at this point I just do what I do and I like to think I’m good at it. If people like it – awesome, if they don’t I don’t really care. You can’t please everybody. I’m just very humbled, like I said, it is ten years and it is five albums and it is a career and we’re still out there doing legitimate tours. We have a label that’s really behind this record and we have a song on the radio – there are some exciting things that are happening along with the underground fan base that we’ve had for so long, and the loyalty that’s there that without the record company and without the song on the radio without the big tour with Black Label Society we’re still a functioning entity. So without all this great, kind of unexpected excitement and opportunity we were confident and content, and now all this new, great, second-chance opportunities are happening to us and instead of us taking it for granted we’re really soaking it in and being really appreciative of the fact that this is still what we do. And it feels good. There are a lot of people who would have gone through the adversity that this band has gone through, and the ups and downs, that would be faced with the opportunities that we have right now and would kind of Tarzan-bang-on-their-chests a little bit, and maybe have a sense of entitlement. But if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that the word ‘deserve’ is a funny word. You don’t really deserve anything; you can work harder than everybody on the planet and be the most talented, most amazing person but it doesn’t really mean you deserve anything. I feel very fortunate, I feel like we’ve worked our asses off and improved ourselves and done what a lot of other bands aren’t willing to do, and for that we’re being rewarded in a way that we’re all very grateful and humbled by.”
Dope’s final words:
“Tell people to check out the Dirge! That record’s going to come next year and it’s going to be sweet.”
Tour Dates (With Black Label Society and Sevendust):
(***) Denotes Headlining Show
Wednesday, 3/25 - North Kansas City, MO - Harrah's
Thursday, 3/26 – Madison, WI – The Annex (WJJO Presents) ***
Friday, 3/27 - Milwaukee, WI - Eagles Ballroom
Saturday, 3/28 - Chicago, IL - Congress Theater
Sunday, 3/29 - Covington, KY (Cincinnati) - Madison Theatre
Monday, 3/30 – Grand Rapids, MI – Intersection ***
Tuesday, 3/31 – MT. Clemens, MI – Emerald Theatre
Wednesday, 4/1 - Pittsburgh, PA - Club Zoo
Thursday, 4/2 – Poughkeepsie, NY – The Chance ***
Friday, 4/3 - Rochester, NY (Buffalo) - Main Street Armory
Saturday, 4/4 - Toronto, ON - Sound Academy
Monday, 4/6 - Hartford, CT - Webster Theatre
Tuesday, 4/7 - Sayreville, NJ - Starland Ballroom)
Thursday, 4/9 - Manchester, NH - Verizon Wireless Arena
Friday, 4/10 - New York, NY - Hammerstein Ballroom
Saturday, 4/11 - Philadelphia, PA - The Electric Factory
Tuesday, 4/14 - Boston, MA - House Of Blues
Wednesday, 4/15 - Baltimore, MD - Ram's Head Live
Thursday, 4/16 – Springfield, VA – Jaxx ***
Friday, 4/17 - N. Myrtle Beach, SC - HOB
Saturday, 4/18 - Duluth, GA (Atlanta) - Wild Bill's
Sunday, 4/19 - Charlotte, NC - Amos Southend
Tuesday, 4/21 - Houston, TX - Warehouse Live
Wednesday, 4/22 – New Orleans, LA – HOB (With Sevendust)
Thursday, 4/23 – San Antonio, TX – Scout Bar ***
Friday, 4/24 - Austin, TX - Stubb's Waller Creek Amp.
Saturday, 4/25 - Dallas, TX - Palladium Ballroom
Sunday, 4/26 - Tulsa, OK - Cain's Ballroom
Tuesday, 4/28 - Tempe, AZ (Phoenix) - Marquee Theatre
Wednesday, 4/29 - Tempe, AZ (Phoenix) - Marquee Theatre
Thursday, 4/30 – San Diego, CA – Brick By Brick ***
Friday, 5/1 - Las Vegas, NV - HOB
Saturday, 5/2 - Los Angeles, CA - The Wiltern
Dope Related Links:
Dope Official website
www.dopearmy.com/
Dope on MySpace
www.myspace.com/dope
Dirge on MySpace
http://www.myspace.com/dirgeil
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Tags: Black Label Society, Dope, Edsel Dope, Sevendust, Zakk Wylde
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