(Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Dave "Snake" Sabo was a recent guest on my Talkin' Rock podcast, and told me about the mindset going into recording "The Gang's All Here," which comes out on October 14th.
"Well, we wanted, at the direction of our producer Nick Raskulinecz, we kind of wanted to make a quintessential Skid Row record. Nick was, it was his vision, to be quite honest. He's the one who kept pressing, like, he goes, 'I wanna make a true Skid Row record.' And he had felt that as the years went by, we'd gotten away, a little bit, from who we were, if you will. And so he brought us back to that. That place within ourselves, that still burns."
He added, "That is the reason why... What are the reasons why you started a band? What are the reasons why you play guitar and write with each other and travel with each other? Like, what are those reasons? Uh, so it brings you back to a place in time that for me personally being a 16-year-old kid standing in front of a mirror with a guitar pretending I'm Ace Frehley or, you know, Eddie Van Halen. And that's the essence of who I am personally as a musician and being a part of this band. And so to retrace our steps back to that point wasn't necessarily an easy process, but Nick had such a way of directing us that it became such a gratifying and exciting experience."
Before the interview, I texted Scott Ian and Frank Bello from Anthrax. I knew they were friends with Snake, so I knew they'd give me something good. I didn't know that he'd played with them around 2000. They both told me to ask him about playing with the band.
"It was such an honor to be a part of that. Uh, I was humbled, greatly humbled by that, that they would ask me to play! And we played maybe five, six shows together." He went on to say, "I've loved that band since the very beginning."
"We're kind of from the same neck of the woods and I love them as people even more so. For me to be able to get, for them to trust me enough to get up on that stage and honor their songs and their legacy was quite humbling and I'm so grateful for that experience. The only problem is, I had to stand next to Frankie Bello...I was afraid to get kicked with his crazy legs every night!"
-Meltdown-
