Rock My Monkey: Hello, you are listening to the Rock My Monkey netcast on RockMyMonkey.com. Today we are speaking with Tommy Victor of the band Prong. How are you doing today, Tommy?
Tommy Victor: Great, Mark. Excellent. I’m in New York City, talking to you. What more could be better?
Rock My Monkey: Cool. I heard you have a stressful day with dealing with airports and everything else today, so I hope you’re not too stressed out.
Tommy Victor: No, I’m alright. I just drank a Stella Artois so I’m feeling very Bohemian and mellow right now. So I’ll be heading out to JFK from Manhattan. Anybody’s who’s been to New York knows that’s probably the worst airport in the world.
Rock My Monkey: (laughs) Cool. Now, I want to start the interview off the proper way I think a Prong interview should start, and that’s with a question from a fan, since we also host the official Prong forum. Replica, from the Prong forum, wants to know what your songwriting process was, and did you write everything yourself and tell the guys what to play, or did the songs change a little bit based on what the other guys want to play?
Tommy Victor: Didn’t tell them anything to play. Didn’t have to, Aaron Rossi being amazing, just came in, knew exactly what to do per song. Some of the tracks were originally demoed with Dan Laudo, and we were curious about that. There seemed to be some problems with the early demos. I was thinking about scrapping those initial demos of songs. Did a medium era demo, maybe about a year and a half, two years ago, then the last demo, which included No Justice, The Banishment, and Power Of The Damager. So in three processes we did that, and then we went back and picked out some of the songs from the early demo with Dan, and Aaron just came in and rocked the part. We could reunite, we could regenerate interest in those songs. So those were cool. The song Bad Fall, that was written a really long time ago, for Rude Awakening. But Monte Pittman had a lot to do with the Third Option, Changing Ending Troubling Times, Can’t Stop The Bleeding. Bass playing on The Banishment was so good I had to give him a songwriting credit on it. That pretty much covers the whole thing. Yeah, I know. It’s amazing. It’s one of my favorite bass playings ever. It’s like the bass on the second chorus is just insane. It’s absolutely out of control. That guy’s amazing. When you got good guys playing with you, you don’t have to tell them anything. Of course they had arrangement suggestions. I always need their okay on everything. Being a singer/guitar player, it’s tough sometimes to be too dictatorial about anything, because you have to just get your own stuff together, and that’s enough of a job for anybody to do.
Rock My Monkey: Cool. Now, also another question from Replica. Do whole songs just pop into your head, or do you agonize over parts that don’t fit? How do you make such seemingly choppy parts flow in such a cohesive way? In short, what’s your secret?
Tommy Victor: Some of it’s just simultaneous. It comes out really quick. Like the song Power Of The Damager, was one of the easiest songs to ever write, and that includes the lyric, which is a quick one. I love it. And then we’re going to use that for the video. It just came together really fast. And it’s almost the same way Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck came together, which came together real fast. I like when that happens. Because otherwise, like Can’t Stop The Bleeding, that song went through a lot of changes. Towards the end we had reinserted another part into it. It was, you know what, this is incomplete. You just have this gut instinct that there needs to be another part. Something that’s a refrain, something to break up a monotony. Or there needs to be a chordal change, or a key change somewhere in there. And there are tempo changes, too, on the record, too. I think Pure Ether has maybe about four different tempo changes, and Spirit Guide. Deciphering those are really tough. It’s a lot of trial and error, back in on the computer, figuring out how to do it, putting the parts together and seeing how they’re going to work. As far as vocals go, sometimes I can sing and play the song right off the bat. Or come up with a riff something on the easier side, like Message Inside Of Me. That almost could be done on acoustic guitar, unplugged, because it’s that kind of song. It doesn’t have heavy, fast, double picking riffing, and you know triplets, and what have you. There’s a lot of work done on the computer to figure out a vocal line. Again done after the fact the music is written. Or simultaneous, too. I keep going back and forth on the computer to see how it’s going to work out.
Rock My Monkey: Now, the third and final question from Replica on the Prong forum. Is Prong destined to be a three piece forever, and what is it about Prong and second guitarists?
Tommy Victor: (laughs) The band started out as a trio. It might as well end as a trio. Monte was a second guitar player, and now he’s playing bass. He’s almost like a second guitar player, because he’s an amazing guitar player. When you come see us live, you’ll see his technical proficiency. He knows what I’m doing, so the communication is there. It’s really exciting. It’s almost like, you know, one of my favorite bands is Cream, and like Jack Bruce and Clapton work so well together, and they fed off one another. So, and you know, nothing’s ever perfect with a trio. During periods of Prong we try to shoot for perfection, and try to have everything dialed in like the record. But I don’t know, man. I think the kind of people that would come to a Prong show, or are exposed to it in some way, would have to accept some of the pitfalls. And then the other excitement of a trio is pulling these songs off. It’s not the easiest thing in the world, believe me. A lot of times having another guitar player, it allows me more freedom as a singer to let parts go a little bit, and the other guitar player take over. I don’t have that luxury right now.
Rock My Monkey: What song do you think on this cd has the potential of becoming the next Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck?
Tommy Victor: I don’t think there will ever be another song like that. It was a different time. That was a fusion of many different styles, and a lot of those styles have been used many times already. What do you do in the future now? I think there are songs on the record that are a fusion of a different style that may have not been used by Prong before. But you know, to really have those kind of expectations about any particular song to reach the level that that song made is hard. I can’t really say. They’re all strong, but in a different way. That’s why Rude Awakening was a different record than Cleansing. Everyone of course wanted another Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck. Of course you could have written a song that changed the format, the actual notes around a little bit, and made it a carbon copy, but I could never do that. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that.
Rock My Monkey: Many are calling this the best Prong cd in many years. What do you think Power Of The Damager has that Scorpio Rising might have been missing?
Tommy Victor: I don’t think Scorpio was completely designed as a Prong record. I was going through a weird phase where I wanted to do things that were distinctly not really Prong. On a really basic level is the tuning we used, which was a very low tuning, was in D. This record goes back to the classic Cleansing tuning of C or D, of the songs, where my vocal range is, I think it hits harder there. If I go a little bit higher, it may start sounding a little screechy, but this is the good pocket. C notoriously is like a dark key, and it brings a lot of, people have these impressions, theories of mystic sort about C, or whatever, that it’s almost a depressing tone. Which I don’t mind. It applies to Prong. Apart from that, the BPM, the beats per minute on this record are way ahead of anything that was on Scorpio. We were limited by the lineup a little bit back then. No serious slag on Dan Laudo. He’s an awesome drummer and like played all the old Prong songs perfectly, in great timing. But we need to pump it up on this record. We needed more technical proficiency, you know, more chops. Aaron’s a shredder. That’s really important, like Ted was. So he could come in and make a real big impact as a drummer, and that was what we needed. And we got the guy to do it. I mean, Pittman is amazing on bass, just as well as he is on guitar. Somewhere in that picture I fall in. The lineup, again, the strength of the performances and the technical proficiency of everyone playing on it, really makes a major difference.
Rock My Monkey: Prong is a legendary band that’s inspired many of the hottest bands today. But what do you as an artist think that Prong still offers fans that no other band today does?
Tommy Victor: It’s the influences. It’s where we come from, it’s from the depths of the lower Eastside, to the depths of downtown L.A., and Boil Heights now. It’s real stuff. There’s not a lot of money in my pockets. There never was. And that generates a lot of urgency. Where if I was shopping for paintings on 57th Street in Manhattan, or having my own displayed or whatever, living this like bourgeois life, I don’t think the integrity of Prong would be of any recognition at all any longer. So it’s like, basically my lifestyle hasn’t really changed that much. I’m still struggling. That creates what it is. As far as how that is apart from a lot of bands? I have very cynical opinions about younger bands in a lot of ways. I’m not always correct about it. But to sit in your basement out in the middle of wherever you are and go put songs on MySpace and become huge, it’s a little different than living the whole lifestyle and touring, and back in the day, and having all of this under your belt. And again, the influences, back to that, is groups like Killing Joke who are sort of forgotten, and the Bauhaus influence and mix that with Deep Purple and Cream and Metallica and Slayer and Celtic Frost and Destruction and Swans and Joy Division again. Mix that all in one bag. People, the reference point is quite different from a lot of other acts. You have a lot of bands that come out that are focused on-now, I mean, the big thing is like, oh, Maiden is back in style. All these bands are like, you know, we got to have the Maiden style guitar thing. Where Prong ignores all that. We just like, do styles in the solos can’t really be pinpointed to anything in particular, I mean, if someone refers to, you know, like Johnny Thunder than it does to Ygnwie Malmsteem in a lot of ways. And it’s raw, too. It’s not focused on arpeggios and modern stylings that much as a good thirty years packed into one big punch right now.
Rock My Monkey: What are your thoughts on the death of Hilly Kristal, and his importance to the history of Prong?
Tommy Victor: Oh, it’s big, it’s of major improtance We sort of lived at that club. I know I did, personally. He gave us a lot of opportunities to play gigs. No favoritism, but that place was great. It was a mecca for hardcore. It was a mecca for punk rock, too, in a lot of ways. Being there all the time and working there, as well as performing there, shaped and molded my whole mentality. We were outside the norm. We weren’t part of the mainstream music scene. It was a very vacuum packed place with no outside intervention or influence. You don’t find that these days, again with the internet. I’m just as much aware of a band from Sweden or Serbia, for that matter, than I am for somebody right in New York City or L.A. now. We were there. That place had it’s own identity. That’s all we cared about was just being there, and the whole lower East Side scene. Which we created having a major scene there, that enabled bands that were playing original music to get their start. It was the end of an era by him passing. It’s like, nothing like that will exist anymore. There’s just no way it could happen.
Rock My Monkey: Absolutely. Now, how did you get involved with Ministry, and how did you get Al Jourgensen to give Prong a spot on his label?
Tommy Victor: He asked me to do it. He wanted to start doing bands outside of like Rev Co. and Ministry. I guess Prong was the next pick for him, because we’re all in the family. I got called in to do Ministry when they were looking for another guitar player, and began the work on the second installation of the last Ministry trilogy, which was Houses of the Molé, Rio Grande Blood, and now The Last Sucker. So the last two of them I’ve worked on. Called me up, and it’s like, you know what, we had some conversations, and he’s just like ‘Why don’t you just come in and write the record with me?’ So I was like, ‘Hell, yeah, I’ll come out and do it.’ So like 80% of the songs on that record I had a participation in. A little less on the new one, but it was a good experience. He’s really excited and motivated about the new record label that he has. Having an identity of people that have been through the meat grinder like Burton Bell, me, Paul Raven, and Hal, has definitely been through the wringer with labels, and you know the whole music scene. Punk rock to metal and then back into alternative music. A lot of history in there that we can relate to. It’s good to have an artist-oriented label. It’s an old term that you don’t even hear any more. It’s just a big cattle call for metal labels now. They’ll throw you a couple of bucks, make a record, see what happens. I was more attracted to this type of scenario than anything.
Rock My Monkey: Cool, cool. Now, many people are also saying that The Last Sucker is the best Ministry cd since Psalm 69. What would you say is your personal favorite on that new Ministry album?
Tommy Victor: I like No Glory. That’s like the last one that was done, and that’s like the scariest to me. I mean, not only did I have an involvement in it, but we started-we did a lot of work on that song, and then Al was like, you know what, there’s something-he kept making phone calls to me, going ‘You know, I got to rip this part.’ I’m like, ‘Dude, just do whatever you’ve got to do.’ And then when I came back, he said ‘I think I finished it’, and I came back out there because I was running back and forth from El Paso to Los Angeles. I was like, this is it, man, this is really cool. And I didn’t mind that he did edit it a lot, and pull a lot of other cool parts out of it. So that was, for me, the most pleasing song on the new record.
Rock My Monkey: What’s the biggest difference between working with Al Jourgensen and working with Glenn Danzig?
Tommy Victor: They’ve both got a lot of energy. Glenn is more decisive on what he likes. He knows sort of more in advance. Basically I only worked on one record with Glenn, which was Circle Of Snakes. From a creative point he had a real distinctive ideas in his head which he would relay to me almost verbally, and then he would allow a complete interpretation of it. So it’s not really that much different than Al in the way that he allows a lot of freedom, but Al is more like ‘I’m thinking of something’ in more of a vague way, and you have to go through a lot of ideas and he’ll pick ones out that he thinks is appropriate for a Ministry song. Of course, you know, I’m more initiating some of the guitar parts, and he’ll manipulate it in his own way where he’ll pick and choose even sections of a riff to chop it up and make it a new Ministry song. With the idea in his head of what the vocal is going to be. And then of course like you’re in the studio a lot longer with Al, because a lot of it’s programmed. There’s a lot of computer work, etcetera, on it. But Glenn is like, it’s like a live band scenario, and like old school rock and roll. Sort of like Prong, where we still want to get potential players out there and like bashing it out in rehearsal. But as far as personalities go, they’re both great. I mean, they’re both awesome guys to work with.
Rock My Monkey: Any plans for a video single for Power Of The Damager?
Tommy Victor: Yeah. We’re thinking about the title track. I mean, a lot of people have different opinions, I mean, you mentioned the ones that you like. Looking For Them was another option, too. But just like a of people are playing that one, and I thought maybe we’d hit them with something that was a little off the cuff. Right now at this time it’s Power Of The Damager, we’re recording, or filming it, rather, October 14th at The Whiskey. I think there may be some live footage thrown in, so if anybody comes down to that show in The Whiskey, you may be in the video, because that’s where we’re filming it.
Rock My Monkey: Sweet. Now, you’ve got some pretty-how can I say it? Some artwork that really stands out amongst all the other artwork that’s out there for other albums. Who did the artwork for that? Who came up with the concept of that?
Tommy Victor: I had a conversation with Lawton Outlaw, who is the artist on it. He pretty much interpreted my ideas of what it was supposed to look like, and did a fantastic job of it. Of course, like any, there’s artistic preferences here and there. But the design was between me and him. He did the actual artwork. I just wanted something that expressed the instantaneous attitude of the record, the brute force of it. A little bit of like insecurity, or your self consciousness and impulsiveness at the same time. Like an image of somebody doing something destructive was basically an idea that I was pretty firmly committed to.
Rock My Monkey: Cool. Now, Bang Bang, the web blog of Ian Christe, author of Sound Of The Beast, Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga, and host on Sirius Satellite Radio’s Hard Attack, recently put the 1986 Prong demo up for download. How did that come about?
Tommy Victor: Where is it? I need it. Where can you get it?
Rock My Monkey: (laughs) I guess it’s BangBangBlog.info, I believe.
Tommy Victor: Really?
Rock My Monkey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Tommy Victor: Because I was thinking about that the other day, and I was like, where is this-it would be cool to maybe bring some of those songs back. There’s one song on there called Guilt Set Sin that I haven’t heard in ages that I always liked and we used to play. Is it called BangBang.com?
Rock My Monkey: I think it’s BangBangBlog.info.
Tommy Victor: Okay.
Rock My Monkey: Yeah. Now, that wasn’t arranged through you?
Tommy Victor: No. I had no-I was wondering who had a copy of the damn thing. Most of those songs came out on Primitive Origins. We re-mixed it, and put some guitar solos on it. I think it’s maybe like a nine song demo, and there’s only like six songs on the Prong cd, on the actually Primitive Origins EP.
Rock My Monkey: Some of the songs of Power Of The Damager come across as rants full of personal venting. What song on this cd is the most personal to you, and why?
Tommy Victor: I would say it’s the title track. I got to cut this short in a second.
Rock My Monkey: Alright. I got one question after this.
Tommy Victor: Okay. I think Power Of The Damager was the easiest song to write. I wrote it down really quickly on an envelope, the lyric. And at the same time of going to the music on it, it just came really free flowing. It just shows like the general malaise I was going through, and how to respond to it.
Rock My Monkey: I do have one final question. Every year we do choose one final question that we ask every single band from classic rock legends to the most extreme death metal bands at the end of every interview. This year I’m asking people to look into their crystal ball and predict what political figure, world leader, musician, celebrity, anybody well known, anybody world wide famous, who do you think might die before the end of the year?
Tommy Victor: Ooh, that’s a tough one. Oh, god. I think Chad Pennington, he’s the quarterback of The Jets, because he’s got no offensive line to protect him.
Rock My Monkey: (laughs) Cool. Alright. Well, I thank you very much for the interview, and anyone that’s listening to the audio version can go to RockMyMonkey.com for the full featured version with clickable links, readable text, and many more wonderful features. I’m asking people to click on the album cover above and below this interview to purchase Power Of The Damager by Prong. And I do hope to see you guys up on tour up in The Northwest sometime soon. Thank you very much for your time, Tommy.
Tommy Victor: Cool. No problem, man. Go to 13thPlanetStore.com and order the record directly through the label. And I hope to see you guys on the tour.
