Truth in Unity
An Interview with Chris Catena
Frankly speaking, hard rock has never been my cup of tea. I can still remember being at this heavy metal gig a long time ago. The guitar player was indulging in never-ending guitar solos. At a certain point I told one of my worst jokes ever, hoping to make the girl who had come with me smile: “what is the difference between masturbation and a guitar solo? That in the first case no one will applaud.” She disappeared from my life, and I deserved it.
But I try to keep an open mind. I don’t want to be biased against any type of music, and sometimes my efforts are pleasantly rewarded — as in the case with Chris Catena’s Rock City Tribe. I have to plead ignorance on this music genre, and won’t go into a detailed review. However, listening to their 2020 album Truth in Unity made me realize how wide-ranging the cultural background of their leader Chris Catena actually is. His sound is influenced by a combination of funk, blues, country and southern rock. There is excellent workmanship in the making of Truth in Unity. Suffice it to say that Chris Catena has joined forces with Swedish guitarist Janne Stark who has co-written and played in most of the 15 songs of the cd, while former Aerosmith member Jimmy Crespo teams up with Blues Saraceno in track number 9 “Who Knew”.
The whole project has a definite Seventies matrix. In the banjo-infused “Get Ready” I had detected a resonance with the southern rock band Drive-By Truckers. However, during our conversation in a bar in the outskirts of Rome, Chris told me he had never heard of the Drive-By Truckers. I think he should check them out. Am I equally mistaken in identifying some affinities with Northern Irish blues guitarist Gary Moore? Be that as it may, the album closer, the 11-minute “Ridin’ the Freebird Highway”, is a dream for guitar lovers. And a final word of commendation for Catena’s rich and varied vocals.
Chris, let’s start from your voice which reaches different vocal ranges and has even been defined as “scintillating” by a specialist rock reviewer. Your father was a renowned Italian tenor. Did he play any significant role in your artistic upbringing?
Scintillating is a term that I like …. it makes me think of the Christmas tree that we have just set up here in the house …. all lights and colors. Let’s say that I have always tried to work on the nuances of the voice making it adaptable to the different genres I have touched with my interpretation in my life …Dad has always supported me and he has never been upset because compared to his style I had decided to marry the cause of rock and roll. But I couldn’t submit to that code made up of a thousand sacrifices that turns a tenor almost into a recluse. I like going to clubs to listen to bands, have a drink and stay late.
You have been in the music business for more than 30 years now, and Truth in Unity features an outstanding list of prestigious names who lent their musical talents to the making of your album. How did you manage to recruit them all? Are there any aspects regarding their involvement you would like to mention?
Well, it is not the first time I produce at all — star projects like this…In truth probably I always did them. But this time I exceeded myself and my expectations….I have known some of the musicians involved for decades and some others joined because I have a good reputation in the States which is where the label which published the cd comes from. I happen to meet musicians, I talk to them, exchange information, have a beer and start a collaboration … Others who like me as a person, help me and introduce me to other artists. This is how things go. Then being a music manager, I have my know-how and a bit of experience that leads me to implement good strategies.
The overall message of Truth in Unity seems to be that labels do not count that much anymore. The feeling I get is that you like to contaminate different music styles by creating a mélange of traditional hard rock subgenres with a modern twist. How easy or how difficult is it to create this sort of synergy in Italy in this particular period?
Dear Marco, rude people would say … I don’t use 4 letter words … but I am a kind person and I avoid it but, both conceptually and musically, I have never worried about the need of labels in the market … I always did what I liked and wanted. Every album I recorded was born under the sign of artistic freedom … When I was younger, I was victim of these shady characters who pretended to be talent scouts … they always made me promises and betrayed them, to try to extort money from me and make me waste precious time with really poor productions. I self-produced the album from A to Z and then I started promoting it by sending it to the CEOs of the industry Record Labels. Grooveyard is not a major label, but a passionate New York label, devoted to rock and roll and electric guitar-driven music. They were immediately enthusiastic about my album and appreciated the style and the songs, so we found an agreement.
You are obviously very interested in the primordial roots of the music that you love. There’s no way out of it, once we start digging we must inevitably trace them back to the original bluesmen who from the 1920s onwards created the sounds we are still enjoying today in rock music. And that means Robert Johnson and his legendary pact with devil at the crossroads. What is your relationship with the existing literature dealing with this type of mythology?
The evolution of rock music has always intrigued me, from its dawn to the early 90s …. Let’s say that I have read everything, essays, writings, biography, monographic works, dedicated to those musicians who sacrificed themselves to the rock and roll gods to bequeath today’s music to the world … from Delta bluesmen Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Blind Lemon Jefferson or Mississippi John Hurt to the beautiful and damned icons like Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Syd Barrett, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin up to Kurt Cobain…. In my music I try to express the path of rock in the past several decades, if not in a whole song, at least in some passages that create reminiscences or particular moments in the melodic lines or in the text. I am also passionate about rock literature especially that of the 50s / 60s which then inspired the beat generation…. From Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs. When I go to San Francisco I often visit the Vesuvio Cafe, the meeting place of these poets and I try to immerse myself in their world.
I notice something. Whenever you talk about The Beatles, and Paul McCartney in particular, your eyes are shining. If time travel were possible, how would you feel about going back to the Swinging Sixties?
It would be nice to have a time machine to make a quantum leap in time ….. To understand how the generations of the period, children of war, faced change both in social and political terms but above all how they welcomed the news in the field of art, fashion, music. I’d like to see the Beatles live at the time of the Cavern … when they still played the covers of American bluesmen or Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, Elvis. It would be great to be a fly on the wall and disturb Paul as he pulls up late in the studio at Abbey to close the solo arrangement of a not-so-loved song like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”.
You and I don’t do drugs. But let’s face it, most of the music we love was made by artists who used to get very very high on all sorts of legal and illegal substances when writing those songs. How would you explain this kind of contradiction — to be against drugs and yet love the music that comes from drugs?
Perhaps because not having lived in that era where everything was new, where everything was a discovery and there was little information … there were no socials, there was no internet …. I grant them an extenuating circumstance. I wonder if I had lived in that period and attended certain tours, what I would have done. I don’t know so I don’t judge … On the contrary … I consider them sacrificial victims and an example not to be followed as a lifestyle. But at the time the world of the record industry was a money machine … It is believed that the same managers and record companies and tour managers offered drugs to musicians to optimize their work and so that they could face grueling breathless tours. The result was totally self-destructive. The curiosity to know the history of these young people is due perhaps also to a certain compassion … A bit like going to a drama film knowing the ending … It makes you feel sorry and makes you want to discover the cause, the reason why we can then reach all this.
When we met, you showed me on your smartphone some impressive rock-related drawings/paintings of yours. Have you been following in Ron Wood’s footsteps lately to try and create a new sort of rock iconography?
I am an artist and as often happens to many in my category, I write, paint, sculpt as well as make music. There is a certain predisposition. Some names of famous rock star painters? Jim Morrison, Syd Barrett, Grace Slick, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen for example as well as Ron Wood, Paul Stanley, David Bowie etc. But here we are talking about the great … I am a humble painter who is very instinctive and who sees in the explosions of color, a form of unconscious message. It will be the period so dark and gray, it will be the current mood, but playing on the range of shades is the manifesto of the positive vibration that I want to give to the world …. positivity above all.
