MusicTAP (Marco Passarelli) - You've been on the 'Reality Tour' for five months now, how has that been going?
Earl Slick - Good. We started rehearsing last July and started doing dates in September so yeah; it's good.
MT - The show I saw at Madison Square Garden in December was great!
ES - Thanks.
MT - One thing that I noticed is that there is an awful lot of material played and that the set lists alter night-to-night. You do you remember all of those tunes?
ES - You know...I don't know! There's like 52 or 53 things now that we know. We just make sure that we touch on these things at sound check you know so we don't forget; not that you're going to forget but you don't want to get rusty on them cuz there's stuff that maybe we haven't played for a few weeks.
MT - So, onto "Zig Zag", all of the guest vocalists on the album contributed their own vocal melodies and lyrics correct?
ES - Yes.
MT - Did you find that you had to change any of the original musical ideas or direction of the song when the tapes came back with the singers' respective parts?
ES - Not really no, I mean everybody hit right on it.
MT - So it was pretty straightforward then as far as you sent them a backing track and they put their melodies on top of it.
ES - Yeah, what we did with Bowie's track is that I gave David some very rough things I recorded with just a couple of guitars on a little multi-track cassette thing and when he found one that hit him, which is the one that we ended up doing called "Isn't It Evening". Once he started doing the lyrics, Mark arranged the track and then we put the track together according to how many versus and choruses David said he wanted to do and then we gave him the track and went in and did it. You know all of it was pretty painless all; it was fun.
MT - Were any of the other vocalists aside from David in the studio with you or was it more of a long distance thing?
ES - Both of the girls came to New York to do their vocals, Martha Davis and Summer (Rose), Roy Langdon did his with me and Mark, we did David's with him in New York, Joe Elliott did his at home in Ireland and Robert Smith did his at home in London.
MT - And speaking of Robert Smith you appear on one of his tracks, a remake of "A Forrest" from the Cure's box set.
ES - Yeah, they call it the 'Plati / Slick' version (laughs).
MT - Yes, it's pretty wild, very cool!
ES - Do you have the box set?
MT - I just got it the other day.
ES - I'm still waiting for mine.
MT - It's great..it's really good.
ES - Is it in the stores?
MT - Yeah, it just came out.
ES - Ah good, you know thank you for that, I'm actually going to do a radio show tonight and they want me to play. I'm DJing for an hour!
MT - Now how did that come about, did Robert Smith send you their new version of the song?
ES - What ended up happening was that Mark was working on it and they wanted me to play guitar on it, so we did the guitars in New York.
MT - It sounds great and he says nice things about you in the liner notes as well.
ES - Oh Really! Ok good; don't tell me, I'll be surprised!
MT - I'm very impressed with Summer Rose who has a great voice...
ES - Yeah, Summer's killer.
MT - Yes, now this is the first time I've heard of her, who is she?
ES - Summer is a girl that sang in a band called Snap Dragon, she's in LA and she's fucking great and I was turned on to her by a friend of mine.
MT - I know that you are finishing the current leg of the Bowie tour with more shows coming this summer, but what are your plans for the near future?
ES - Right now, the big plan is that as soon as the tour is over I'm taking a month off! (Laughs) But I'm going to get back to writing again, I'm thinking of doing some dates at the end of the year; not a tour but I want to get me and Plati and a few guys and go out and do some dates around New York maybe.
MT - Recording the album was done entirely in Logic Audio...
ES - Yeah
MT - ...How did you like working in the digital realm?
ES - I like it. Well you know, the thing is that Mark is so fucking good at this that he makes your life real easy. I mean he was doing things before I could even think of them half the time!
MT - Some of the rhythmic things and the range of sounds on the album are fantastic.
ES - Yeah, Mark put together some really good stuff. The other thing too about the Logic Audio which is cool and it also has a lot to do with how good Mark is at it, is that I'm very much a first take kind of guy, you gotta catch me in the right mood sometimes and there was no waste of time with tape machines breaking down or rewinding tape so Mark was able to record me as I was coming up with things.
MT - Sure.
ES - So we weren't losing anything you know?
MT - Exactly. There are also a lot of atmospheric guitar things on the album.
ES - That's something that I never was able to do before because it was always making records with bands or always doing rock records and I wanted to represent just where I'm at right now.
MT - Right.
ES - And that's what it is.
MT - It seemed like when you got back in Bowie's band in the summer of 2000 that there was a big change in your playing.
ES - I think it came down to, first of all I took a break for a while and when I came back in, my head was different. And it needed to be.
MT - I did have a couple of questions about other work that you have done and particularly Phantom, Rocker and Slick. Do you think those two albums will get released on CD?
ES - You know, you're not the first person to ask me this; I don't know, I wouldn't think so.
MT - Right.
ES - It's funny though because that record was made at a point when obviously they were still doing vinyl, and they were doing CDs but to do a CD there was this weird thing where if you sold x amount of records, like if you sold, I don't know, half a million albums they would put it on a CD. It wasn't an automatic thing yet.
MT - Right, ok.
ES - Probably within a year or two after that is when that happened.
MT - Now the Stray Cats did a final, contractual album for EMI in 1986 called "Rock Therapy" and there was a song on there called "I Wanna Cry"...
ES - I think I'm on it.
MT - You were, right? I always thought so but it was uncredited on the album.
ES - I think I actually might have written some of it.
MT - Ah there we go, I finally have the answer to that one! Now we have a question from the editor of MusicTAP who would like to know what it was like working with Ian Hunter?
ES - It was good, Ian was a lot of fun it was great; we did one album together and we did a tour over in Europe.
MT - Oh you did? What year was that?
ES - Ahhh...'77, I think.
MT - Ok. Well, I think that's it.
ES - All right, got everything?
MT - Yes, thank you so much for your time.
ES - Well, Thanks for calling.
