Helmet

A conversation with Page Hamilton

(February 2008)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Helmet have long been recognized as one of the better bruisers in hard rock, thanks to main man Page Hamilton's ability to blend the lessons of his musical education (he has a Masters in jazz guitar, and name-checks Charlie Parker with much more regularity than any bastions of rock) with relentless, focused muscle that is given a signature tweak by the band's unusual tunings and ambitious arrangements.  In the early '90s, Helmet made a major splash with Meantime, but by the time they had released Betty (still regarded as an essential album by critics and Helmet diehards alike), the marketplace had cooled.  The band soldiered on, and then, eventually, fell on their shields.

But Hamilton still had unfinished business, and resuscitated the band - with a new lineup - for 2004's Size Matters and 2006's Monochrome.  In the last couple years, they have gained exposure to younger audiences through a slot on the Warped Tour, a song ("Unsung") on the wickedly awesome game Guitar Hero, and a song ("Gone") on the Saw III soundtrack.  And then they gained exposure to a large but difficult audience with an opening slot on the recent Guns N' Roses trek.  As 2007 arrived, Hamilton decided it was time that Helmet had some alone time, and thus set off for a short headlining jaunt along the West Coast.

Prior to his stop in Los Angeles for two nights at the Troubadour (January 31 and February 1), Hamilton talked to The Red Alert about his long road in hard rock, his response to fans who have been unhappy post-Betty, and his plans for a Helmet-less future.

Have you noticed a spike in your fanbase because of the inclusion in Guitar Hero and Saw III? 

You know, Jimmy, my other guitar player, kind of keeps up with the MySpace stuff, and my buddy Brandon, who’s doing merch for us and helping me out, keeps an eye on the Helmet stuff—and they’re saying they’re seeing some increased interest.  I like to think that the Guns N’ Roses shows and these new shows helped as well.  It’s cool—I’ve unfortunately gotten to the point where I don’t really expect much from anything, and I’m thankful that I get to make records and everything.  I never have any delusions that the band is going to be huge or whatever—I just want to keep doing it while I still can.

We had Eagles of Death Metal featured on our site a while back, and their opening slot on the GNR tour obviously didn’t go so well.  Did you have a better experience?  It sounds like you did.

Well, we did.  It’s tough to deal with, but I’ve dealt with it for so fucking long.  From music school on, it seems like everything you do is criticized in some way; there’s always gonna be somebody out there to knock you down.  In the case of opening for another band, there’s going to be a percentage of people who are close-minded, and you can’t think that it has a bearing on the musical worth of what you’re doing—even though it’s hard to deal with.  I guess I’ve gotten a little thick-skinned, and I’m just determined—but on that first show with Guns N’ Roses, I was just shocked.  I couldn’t even believe it.  There were people that were into it, but that might have been one percent out of ten or twelve thousand people, and the other people were booing and throwing shit.  It’s kind of brutal.  I kept a stiff upper lip and smiled and thanked them and bowed at the end.  I think the Eagles kind of walked off stage or somebody turned the house lights on or something and it just got really bad.  I really like the Eagles, and we were fortunate to see ‘em in Seattle and hang out with them, and I said, “I hope there’s no hard feelings; it’s a great opportunity for us to go and play in front of a large audience, and Axl told me that he was a fan of Helmet.”  It was just an unfortunate situation, but it turned out to be great for us.  If we turned some people on to our music—if we turned one person on to our music—then it was worth our while.

What motivated this brief jaunt along the West Coast in January?

These shows were supposed to be the first shows with the new lineup.  When the Guns N’ Roses thing came up, I still wanted to keep these dates.  So we’re doing this for fun.  I’m also trying to make back some of my Warped Tour deficit.  I’m owed a bunch of money for some shit that I haven’t been paid for, and I can’t afford that.  I can’t afford to lose money on the band; I have to break even in order to maintain it.  I’m hoping that people will step up and pay the money they owe me.

Wouldn’t that be nice!

Yeah.  (laughs)  So this was about trying to make some money and have some fun.  We haven’t played Helmet shows, you know, we did the Warped Tour and Guns n’ Roses, but we haven’t done shows exclusively for Helmet fans, and I really need it at this point.  It does wear you out, trying to convert people and feeling like they don’t know any of your music or understand what you’re trying to do.  It’s nice to walk up on the stage for a room of people that are there to see you, and cheer when you play some obscure song from Strap It On.

Are there older or obscure songs that are hard to reconnect with?  Are there ones you’ve retired?

No, not after some time away from it.  Coming back to it and having people request certain songs, I’ve gone back to some things and I appreciate what was good about a particular song.  There’s a song “Speechless” that we kept getting requests for, and I always thought, “Ah, fuck that song,” but I learned it and really had a good time playing it.  It’s a completely different vocal range, and there are some good lines in the song and it’s got a nice, heavy, lumbering groove to it.  There are some other songs that people have been requesting that we’re going to try to learn.  It’s fun.  I don’t want it to be about having to play certain songs every night; obviously “Unsung” is one that people want to hear.  We get a lot of requests for “Ironhead” and “Give It,” stuff from the Meantime record, which was the biggest in the U.S.

Are there still places that you want to see on tour, places that you never had a chance to hit?  Do you even feel like you get a chance to really see places when you’re out on tour?

I’ve traveled so much for twenty years now—I guess even more.  I went to Germany in 1982 to study, and I was gone for a year, and I went to Greece for a month on two hundred bucks with my backpack.  And then traveling with the band, and traveling to see my family… it’s weird, I’m really getting to a point in life where I’m putting a deadline on it, like when I hit 50 years old in 2010, I think I might stop doing Helmet.

I want to do two more records, because I have a bunch of ideas lying around.  I’ll probably miss it when I stop, and not that there aren’t places I’d like to go—I’ve never been anywhere in the African continent, I’ve only been to Brazil in South America, we’ve been invited to Puerto Rico and Mexico—but I’m also getting worn out a little bit.  I’d like to start building up my orchestration and composition chops, and I’d like to have a family, actually; since my divorce, I’ve been kind of all-consumed with music and living the single lifestyle.  It’s a great life, and my playing and singing and writing have all improved in leaps and bounds since I moved to L.A. and buckled down like I did when I was in school.

And you do get to spend time in places.  It might be because you’ve been there a dozen times in 10 or 15 or 20 years and it’s not a big city, so you wander around and know where to get a falafel at one in the morning, and know where to get a beer, and where to point friends that want to get stoned, and where to point friends that want to get laid.  I’m sure if I have a year or two to settle down, I’m sure I would miss it and want to go out and see places.

But you still see yourself releasing music—whether solo records or scoring or whatever it may be—even if you end up off the road?

Yeah.  Since the holidays, I haven’t done shit, but I was really working hard on Charlie Parker changes and playing eighth notes through that—then going through Bartok and Revell and starting to pick apart orchestration and trying to figure out how the hell to write for an orchestra.  I’ve been so lucky to work with Elliott Goldenthal on these movies, and that’s peaked my interest in the last 10 or 12 years, to the point where I’ve listened pretty much to only classical music except when I have a band to work with.  That producing thing, too, kind of gets me motivated to continue Helmet because I get fired up—things I can’t persuade bands to keep from doing so they don’t embarrass themselves, I think, “Well, I know I can write this and it won’t be embarrassing.”  That’s part of producing:  bands will make mistakes.  That’s something I want to continue doing because it allows me to stay home, but my grand fantasy really involves writing great music for an orchestra, whether in film or through someone giving me a grant to work on something.  I want to do a couple more Helmet albums, and then I think it might be time to move on for good.

I don’t hear established musicians talk about that very much, that notion of having more to learn or wanting to shed everything and start anew.

Well, rock is harmonically pretty simple.  If you look at a pretty complex song by David Bowie, like “Quicksand”...by rock standards, that’s a pretty complex song.  Paul Simon—pick a song.  I’m a riff guy.  I like heavy music, and I have my own voicings and things that are more modal, and there’s not a lot of tension resolution in the sense of classic harmony.  It’s a different kind of tension—noise and abrupt changes.  I’ve chosen to limit myself to my vocabulary and then try to expand within those confines.  That was my choice.  I’m not a strummer singer-songwriter kind of guy, I’m not writing songs coming from that tradition, and I never have.  I don’t really have an interest in it.  I don’t really feel like anybody is going to surpass Bob Dylan or Elvis Costello—or somebody might, but it won’t be me. (laughs)  So I’ve tried to continue in this world, and I don’t know if it will translate in some way to an orchestra world where I won’t just mimic what I see on the page with Revell or Samuel Barber or whatever.  You have to learn those things, and I’m an idiot when it comes to that stuff; I love listening to it, and I can pick it apart a little bit, and it’s really exciting—but it’s a lot of work.  And I still need to support myself, so hopefully someone will take a chance on someone who has a kind of bizarre background—you know, heavy metal dude or whatever. (laughs)  It will certainly be a different kind of score from anything anybody has heard.  I did a movie called Chicago Cab and had such a great time because the directors, John Tintori and Mary Cybulski, were so open-minded and so into my input.  I know it’s not always going to be like that.

Putting your producer cap on for a second, I was wondering whether you have any general lessons for bands that are starting out—repeat mistakes you’ve seen made or anything like that.

Something I’m really good at, I think, is trimming the fat, and giving the arrangements more forward movement, so you don’t get bored on some part that just continues.  I try to be delicate with lyrics and melodies, but if you substitute chords, it’s not like, “Okay, here’s the chorus for the third time” and it’s the same goddamn chord change.  I’ve been really lucky to work with bands and artists that aren’t too attached to some part or section that they won’t let me gut it and tear it out of there.  If you want someone to help you improve as a writer and improve at making albums, you have to be open to that.  That’s what you’re paying for.  In a nutshell, be more patient with the arrangement.  Because you think there’s a cool part, don’t say the song is done.  Two cool parts does not make a song.  Try to make the song the best song it can be, and spend time with it.  All those little details in Helmet songs—if the music has stood up, I think it’s that attention to detail that has helped.

I’ve gone back and thought “What was I thinking here?”  I was into the stream-of-conscious kind of writing, and that makes a little more sense to me now.  There’s this kind of snobbery in the songwriter community that I always hated, with the wordsmith guys or whatever.  That’s what I was sort or railing against back then—“Yeah, whatever, take this and shove it up your ass.”  That comes from journalists a lot, too, like “This is songwriting, this isn’t songwriting.”  So if I don’t adhere to these rules, what I do is not valid?  I notice that you can hear influences in bands now more than you could in 1988, ’89, ’90, ’91 in New York City when there were bands like “What the fuck is that?  This is certainly its own thing.”

I spent some time online reading through a bunch of threads on your message board.  There are obviously fans who dig deep into every detail, from lineup changes to album artwork.  Can you sympathize or empathize with that as a music fan?  If Charlie Parker were alive, would you be online asking him questions and debating other Charlie Parker fans?  Or would you prefer to let the music breathe on its own?

I don’t know.  I just answered some questions after Christmas, and that’s enjoyable to a certain extent.  I don’t know.  It’s an honor to meet somebody that you admire, and somebody that inspired you or made you change your life or made you want to be better.  But to try to get more from them than that… You have to have energy and balls yourself, and go into the music and try to appreciate it if somebody is doing something different.  If John Coltrane were alive, for example, and he came out with A Love Supreme, and I love that record, and then somehow he ends up at Interstellar Space and I didn’t get it, I’m not going to say, “He fucking sucks.  This record sucks.  What the hell happened to him?  He used to be so great.”  That’s the thing that wears me out.  I dedicate my life to music—I do this all the time, every day, and have for 30 years now.  I think the Internet has made it a little too easy for people to have access to quantities of music and to not give someone the benefit of the doubt.  Like Elvis Costello and David Bowie, those guys have earned the right to do whatever the fuck they want, as far as I’m concerned.  With that said, I’m a fan, and I love Ziggy Stardust and Scary Monsters, and if [Bowie] comes out with something that doesn’t sound like that, it might take me aback, but I’m not going to sit there and say it sucks.  And I think my personal life and the things I do are not really anybody’s business, necessarily.  I just read a biography of Parker, and that’s certainly interesting now that he’s dead and he’s left a body of work.  There were so many things about his life that I didn’t know, but it doesn’t change my opinion of the music he made, even though he wasn’t the greatest guy in the world.  I don’t romanticize it and think “I want to be like he was.”  I want to play his music better, and I want to get his music in my soul and in my head and in my body, and I want to know everything about it that I can.  No matter what he did as a human being, I love him.  It’s a sad story, though, and I don’t want my life to be a sad story.

Somebody asked, “You said you’re so good with the fans at shows—why don’t you participate in chat rooms or the forum?”  It’s very time-consuming, and I have a lot that I want to accomplish musically.  That takes nothing away from my appreciation of people supporting my band and giving their feedback.  But any artist worth his weight has to have his own vision, and I’m not going to be influenced by some guy that says “Ironhead” is better than “Everybody Loves You” or “Surgery” or “Swallowing Everything” or whatever.  I cannot sit there and try to second-guess myself; I have to do the homework every day and try to develop my music.  That’s how I’ll judge myself at the end of my life—did I progress as a musician and as a singer, songwriter and composer?  The answer right now is “So far, so good.”  (laughs)  I haven’t gotten stuck in too much of a rut.