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A few months ago AOR HEAVEN released the CD of a band called VITAL SIGNS. The album was filled with material the band recorded a decade ago, but as it was never released officially, AOR HEAVEN did a great job releasing this AOR gem. Any fan of bands like WHITE SISTER, FM, URGENT should purchase this pure 80s AOR sounding record. I had an interview with guitarist/songwriter Jimmy Z, who told me it ain't over yet, as VITAL SIGNS is making a comeback!
Please
introduce us your band, when did you form VITAL SIGNS and did any
of you play in bands before VITAL SINGS?
JZ: Well, I’m Jimmy Z and I play lead guitar in Vital Signs.
I started working professionally when I was quite young. My first
band was a “Kid Band”. I was only nine years old, the
bass player was ten and the drummer was eight years old. We were
pretty good and before we knew it we were playing a lot of clubs
and Army bases and we were playing bars that we were too young to
get into. Because of the liquor laws, we had to stand outside the
clubs during our breaks. After a couple of years we got the
opportunity to go and open a concert for this singer, Bobbie
Gentry. Bobbie had a big hit song at the time, “Ode To Billy
Joe”, and she was headlining at Harrah’s Casino in Lake
Tahoe. So there I was, eleven years old and I was playing in
front of 900 people at a sold out show. We were just little kids
and there we were playing for this big show in one of the biggest
casino showrooms in Nevada.
Later I played with my Dad’s band. All through my childhood,
I was out at clubs, playing other peoples songs with musicians
that were way older than me. In high school I formed a band
called “True Heat”. The biggest thing we had going was
a fog machine! (Laughs)
When I got out of high school, I hooked up with Danny
(Pasternak), Doug (Freedman) and Randy Paige, who was our bass
player for a number of years. We were playing in a band called
“Rags” and we worked a lot. Rags was a very successful
cover band and we played a pretty tasty mix of hard rock and
progressive rock. Eventually, we started doing our own original
songs and, surprisingly, they were well received in most of the
dance clubs, although some of the clubs didn’t like it. They
wanted us to be a “live jukebox” and just play covers.
As time went by we began to tire of the cover band thing and
wanted to be an original rock band. About this time, we hooked up
with Scoop Sweeney, our manager, and he agreed that we should get
serious about being an original band. Our singer at that time
wasn’t working out, doing the original songs, so we started
looking for a new front man.
Danny and I happened to be in the crowd at the Keystone in Palo
Alto where we saw David Notary singing with another local band.
As soon as Dave hit the stage and started singing and shaking his
hair around, I knew we had found a singer. I looked at Dan and
said, “That’s the guy!!” and, as it turned out, he
was the guy we picked to sing in Vital Signs. Later on, Mitch
Northon, a great singer and bass player joined the band and the
current lineup for Vital Signs was set.
How close were you in getting a
label deal back then?
JZ: Actually, we had a couple of deals in the late Eighties,
first with Atlantic Records and later with A&M Records. In
those days, they were called “demo deals”, which meant
they would give us a lot of money to go into the studio and
record a bunch of songs. If the label liked what they heard, they
would put out a record. If they didn’t pick up the
band’s option, then you got to walk away with the finished
master tapes. That’s how the Vital Signs CD came about. We
walked away with the master tapes to all those songs and
didn’t have to pay a penny! The labels both said they were
looking for something “more modern”, meaning they were
already jumping onto the “alternative” bandwagon.
When did
you split up?
JZ: Well, we didn’t actually “split up” as such.
There was never a particular day when we said, “We’re
breaking up!” What happened is, we got the contract to
record “The Boys And Girls Are Doing It” for the movie
“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”. We figured
we had finally hit it big! A&M decided to release the song as
a CD single and put up $110,000 to shoot a big budget video of
the song. The song and video did really well and we thought it
was only a matter of time before we got “The Big Deal”
with A&M. What happened instead was, they were already
looking at “alternative” acts and weren’t really
interested in signing a hard rock act. When that became obvious,
we decided to go back to the Bay Area and work on our own
projects for a while and see if the whole “alternative”
thing would last. We figured that Vital Signs would get together
again, since we were a good band and we didn’t want all
those songs to just go to waste. We didn’t think it would be
a decade later, when we did get together but it all worked out
for the best. The reception to our first CD has been amazing!
What did you do between the
split and the CD that has now been released?
After Vital Signs, I did a lot of sessions with Troy Luccketta,
the drummer from Tesla. I also played and recorded with a
jazz-fusion band called Faldo’s Toy. Faldo’s Toy
recorded a CD that sold pretty well and we played a lot. And
recently, I worked on an album called Guitar Farm, which is an
instrumental guitar project featuring a lot of great Bay Area
guitarists. I wrote five songs for that project, including the
only vocal track “Play This Guitar”. “Play This
Guitar” is a blues tune and features Tommy Castro, a great
player, on lead guitar. I played on all the tracks for Guitar
Farm, playing both rhythm guitar and some solos. The record has a
lot of great players, people like:
Dave Meniketti from Y&T
Jeff Watson and Brad Gillis from Night Ranger.
Mark McGee from the Greg Allman Band
Pat Thrall
Steve Morse from Deep Purple
John Marshall from Metal Church
Ronnie Montrose
Jeff Tamelier fromTower Of Power
and Troy Luccketta from Tesla played drums on some of the songs.
There are
some really nice tracks on this record. I hope it makes it over
to you guys in Europe!
All the other guys in Vital Signs stayed busy during our break
from the band. David played drums and sang in a band with Kevin
Carlson from Aldo Nova and did some shows with Eric Martin. Doug
played with a number of Bay Area bands and Mitch, our bass
player, was in a band with Leonard Haze from Y&T. Danny
Pasternak has been writing and producing music for TV and Films
plus he has released a couple of great CD’s on his own
record label.
How did
you get in touch with AOR HEAVEN?
JZ: Well, actually AOR Heaven got in touch with us. We
weren’t even shopping the songs to anyone at the time. Our
friend Magnus Soderkvist approached Georg at AOR Heaven and
played him a copy of our demo tape. Apparently Magnus got a copy
of the demo some years back and liked what he heard. Georg also
liked the tunes and decided to approach Vital Signs about
releasing a CD in Europe.
You finally have released a CD,
are you proud of it and did you ever think this would never
happen?
JZ: Proud? Absolutely! We all put a lot of years into Vital
Signs, playing all over the country night after night, traveling
from San Francisco to L.A. all those times to record these songs.
All of us gave up a lot to create this record. You hear about
performers “paying dues” and there is a lot of truth to
that! Being in a band isn’t all glory and applause and
hanging out acting like a rock star. It’s mostly a lot of
nights spent in the rehearsal studio, working out parts, arguing
over what chords to play, rehearsing the live show or preparing a
song for the recording studio. There were all the crummy gigs we
had to play before we were able play the great ones. It’s a
great feeling to have people finally listening to Vital
Signs’ music, to have people actually paying money for this
thing that we put all that work into! If I could, I would like to
meet each of those people personally and thank them for helping
give Vital Signs a new start!
The music
is pure 80s AOR, which bands influenced you?
JZ: That’s a tough one! We’re all influenced by the
stuff we grew up with, by bands our friends are in, by stuff we
heard on the radio but we were more influenced by the times. We
were right in the middle of the action back in the Eighties.
Growing up as a musician in the San Francisco Bay Area, you
couldn’t help but be exposed to a lot of great music and
musicians. Our local bands were guys like Y&T, Night Ranger,
Journey, Tesla, The Eric Martin Band, Eddie Money and Babylon
A.D. We were friends with guys in all those bands, so we would
hang out with those guys when we weren’t playing somewhere.
We would drop by their shows, they would show up at our gigs, it
was a great time to be in a band! I think that influenced us more
than anything.
Are you
writing new material, and what's it gonna sound like? And the
songs, please tell us about them if you wrote any new ones?
JZ: Well, we’re definitely working on new material. I just
finished a great new song and have another half dozen or so that
I have written over the last few months. In addition, we have
another two-dozen songs that never got recorded…great songs
that we would love to put on our next record. If some record
company is interested in putting out another Vital Signs CD, then
we will be happy to record one! How will it sound? Well…it
will sound like Vital Signs! We don’t plan on changing our
sound. You won’t hear any rap or grunge or trendy sounds. On
the other hand, we are all a lot better players and writers. We
all grew a lot as musicians over the last ten years, so you may
hear a few surprises! I think the new song that we recorded back
in October, Bang Bang, is a little indication of where Vital
Signs is headed…a little heavier, very guitar oriented and
in your face!
Now you
dedicated the CD to a friend of yours, a rock photographer, who
sadly died, please tell us more about him...
JZ: Yeah, the CD is dedicated to our friend Randy Bachman…we
just called him “The Bachman”. He was a real trip!
Randy was less than four foot tall but he didn’t let that
stop him from becoming a great rock photographer. He was hanging
out with the band from the very beginning. The Bachman would go
on the road with us, hang out at the rehearsal studio and went to
just about every show that we did. He was a great friend and we
felt that dedicating the CD to his memory was appropriate, since
he was one of our biggest supporters and did a lot to help Vital
Signs. I remember one time when he got pissed off because we
weren’t playing any Bill Graham shows. He went down to their
offices and told them Vital Signs should be playing some of their
shows. If it had been anyone else, they would have kicked him out
into the street but everyone knew Bachman, so they heard him out.
Not long after that we started getting some dates on Bill Graham
shows! The guy was amazing! He had more balls than guys twice his
size!
Were you
popular in your area back in the 1980s and how's the situation
nowadays? And how about the old VITAL SIGNS fans, are they aware
of the CD?
JZ: Popular? Yeah, I guess we were pretty popular, especially in
the Bay Area. We played constantly, so we developed quite a
following over the years. Today? Well American audiences are
pretty much out of touch with melodic rock. It is much more
popular in Europe or Japan than in the States. I think MTV and
American radio, especially in the major cities like San
Francisco, L.A. and New York, are responsible for the fact that
you don’t hear a lot of melodic rock over here. The funny
thing is, when you get outside of those three cities, you find
that people are listening to classic, melodic rock! If you drive
across the country, that’s what you hear on the radio! I
think the major media controls the music business, not the people
who listen to music. Until that changes, we will probably
concentrate our efforts in Europe and Japan.
As for the
old fans, they’re still around and a lot of them have bought
the CD. We get emails from them and we try to answer each one
personally. We have always been that way. If it wasn’t for
the fans, none of this would be happening.
I heard
about this videoclip of one of your songs, please tell us all
about it..
JZ: The Boys And Girls Are Doing It…that’s a great song
and has been really good for us over the years. Back in 1987, we
were offered the chance to record the song for the movie
“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”.
Apparently, A&M Records had been trying to find the right
band to record the song for the movie and couldn’t find a
band that could give it the treatment that they wanted. As luck
would have it, our producer David Sieff was working as a staff
producer at A&M and he heard one of the producers that was
working on the movie complain about not finding the right band to
do the song. He played some of our tapes for the guy and he knew
that Vital Signs were right for the movie! It took more than a
year for them to get the movie released but when it was ready to
come out, A&M called us and said they wanted to release The
Boys And Girls Are Doing It as a single from the soundtrack
album! The next thing we knew, we were flying down to Hollywood
to film a video. It was a great experience! We showed up at the
Chaplin Soundstage on the A&M lot and they had this
incredible set built for us. We spent the entire day filming on
this set. They had dancing girls in phone booths, flying over the
set on cables. It was quite a spectacle! The guys from U2 and
Survivor dropped by the set to see what was happening. They were
all great guys to talk to. They all seemed to like what we were
doing.
It was a great experience! The video debuted on NBC TV, on their
Friday Night Videos program, and then it played on MTV the next
day! Even today, when I watch it, it’s a great video. I
think it’s available again, on the internet at
Melodicrock.tv, so people should check it out.
What are
the plans for the next coming months?
JZ: Well, we are already starting to work on Vital Signs 2, so
hopefully some record company will decide they want to put it
out. We certainly have a lot of great material, both old and new,
so I think it will be even better than the first record. Our
manager Scoop Sweeney is also working on getting us over to
Europe to play live! He just met with one of Europe’s top
promoters to talk about a Vital Signs tour, so hopefully that
will come together and we will be able to play live over there.
Finally,
do you have anything to add to our readers?
JZ: Well, I just want to thank all of the people who bought our
CD! It means a lot to us and we hope we can come over and meet a
lot of those people in person when we tour Europe!