Jack Russell rises again
Thirty years after the album Once Bitten took Great White from the club scene in Los Angeles to the big time, the old band may be splintered into separate camps, but Jack Russell is still on the road, still releasing albums and, surprisingly, still in top form vocally. At 56, after years of excess, that would have seemed to make that an impossibility.
But as he sings on the title track of his latest album under the Jack Russell’s Great White name, ‘He Saw it Coming,’ “I’ve fallen down a thousand times, a thousand times I’ve risen.”
That could be taken a thousand ways considered all the Montebello, California native has seen, but when it comes to his vocals, his method for remaining in shape is a simple one.
“I warm up religiously,” he said. “I have the same routine I had when I was 23, but the scales are a little more advanced now. There are three points in your life where your vocal cords will get thicker and change the tone of your voice. And if you’re not warming up, you’re going to kill yourself. There are guys who go out and do shows and it’s hellish for them. So that really saved my career, because at one point, I couldn’t sing more than two shows in a row.”
Dealing with drug and alcohol addictions just added to his woes, and when the band played The Station nightclub in Rhode Island in 2003, where a fire ignited during the first song of the set and killed 100 people, it began a downward spiral for one of the era’s top hard rock singers.
Eventually, Russell would get sober and begin the road back. And with his new record, it sounds like he’s got his groove back.
“Without change, there’s no growth,” he said. “For me, Every record is a snapshot of where I’m at mentally, physically, spiritually, so it’s been a great tool for my therapy. Why pay a doctor when I can tell thousands of people what’s going on? That’s a pretty cool life.”
This weekend, Russell and his bandmates are in Columbia, Maryland for the annual M3 Rock Festival which celebrates the hard rock of the 80s and 90s and the folks that played it. And while it’s always fun to see those bands back on stage, there are inevitably a few singers that can’t hit those notes anymore. Russell can, and just like he does with his albums, he’s not trying to recapture what happened decades ago. He’s looking to be relevant in 2017.
“I go in there with the feeling that I’m gonna try and be as good as I can and try to be better than the last record,” he said. “Every year and every record, I learn more. I don’t believe there’s ever an end.”
That’s good news, because for Russell and several of his peers from those heady days on the Sunset Strip, the end did come, and it came much too fast. But when you’re young and on top of the world, the consequences never seem to be something considered. He recalls the recording of the album …Twice Shy, which went double platinum and produced two Top 30 hits.
“We had rehearsed for that album so much that when I went in to sing it, it was very stale,” said Russell. “It was like ‘This guy’s rehearsed these songs once too many times.’ I was trying to be emotive and trying to put some feeling in it, and I just couldn’t get it. We did this for two hours and didn’t get anything. So my manager goes, ‘Why don’t you go down to the store and get a quart of Stoli.’ I came back, drank some of that, and the determination and joy for what I was doing came right back. I just lost it for a second there. And the song, when I got a little gassed, was the perfect performance as far as my producer was concerned.”
There’s no vodka in the studio or on stage these days, and that’s fine with Russell, though he does wish there was less of that in the past, even if only to appreciate what he and his bandmates accomplished.
“It’s gone by so fast,” he said. “Sometimes, it feels like it’s been forever, but then when you look at it, it’s really just flown by, and I keep kicking myself in the butt because I wish it slowed down a bit just to soak it in. Instead, it was, ‘we gotta get another album out, we don’t want to lose momentum.’”
Today, Russell is enjoying the ride, and while he’s happy to keep putting out good music, his main reason for continuing to do this is for another reason entirely.
“It’s when somebody comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, this song got me off drugs,’ or ‘This song has been the soundtrack to my life.’ That’s when you really know how powerful music is.”
Jack Russell’s Great White plays the M3 Rock Festival in Columbia, MD on Saturday, April 29. For tickets, click here
