Certain bands have a pedigree that can’t be ignored. That pedigree stands out, even more, when your band has been blessed by legendary Motorhead leader Lemmy. Patrick Stone was a member of the Motorhead road crew and, eventually, his band Budderside became the first band signed by Lemmy to Motorhead’s record label. Budderside is about to release its second record, Spiritual Violence, and Patrick sat down to talk about the amazing story of this band and how legendary acts like Quiet Riot, Steven Adler, and Velvet Revolver all played a role.
Please press the PLAY icon for the MisplacedStraws.com Conversation with Patrick Stone –
On the band’s changes between the debut and Spiritual Violence – We went through a huge metamorphosis, Budderside as a group. The guys that I originally started the band with were my childhood friends. We had done everything together and we had been together through thick and thin. It was a really hard separation. But there were a lot of factors that kind of played in a lot of arguing started to happen with some of the guys. We just weren’t going in the direction that I really knew that we needed to. So I had to follow my heart and my heart led me to Sam Bam Koltun (who) was the first one to step in and we just kind of started just raging down this road, just letting creativity take over. After a few arguments got a little bit too heated, we decided to make the switch. Then Sam and I really put our heads together to think of who in town, who in the world would be our ideal band members. I remember Steven Adler telling me the stories of him and Slash and stuff in school and how they were so meticulous in who they were going to pick for their final rendition of whatever it was they were going to really set their minds on. That stuck with me. It was scratching at the back of my mind my entire life, really. They had been in a lot of bands together, L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose and stuff like that before they finally put together their dream team, Guns N Roses. But Sam and I kind of did the same thing. No disrespect to the guys that were in the group. Everybody that’s played with me, I just have the utmost respect for, they’re dedicated, I love all of them to death. It’s just sometimes just like with girlfriends, you think you’ve got the right thing and then all of a sudden you find something out about each other and you just take a different direction and you got to pursue what makes you the happiest. But Sam and I found the best of the best in town. We were definitely right in picking who we did because we went from a tour bus that blew up down to a little tiny minivan and spent three months on the road to get in this little thing and nothing but laughs. We just get along great. We just went out to Arizona to record another record with producer Matt Goode. We put ourselves to the test creatively, because not only is it important that you get along, but we also want to have like-minded goals. We also want to know that we’re working with people that are going to have input creatively as much as the other guy. So we’re trying to keep up with one another and getting into the studio in that setting, put us to the test. We wrote four of my most favorite songs I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m so stoked that it’s something that we wrote. :57
On how he hooked up with Adler’s Appetite – Alex Grossi brought me in, Grossi and I had worked together, he was in Quiet Riot and I was slated to be the first singer to replace Kevin (DuBrow) and what an honor that was. But that stepped up my game. I really wasn’t prepared. I thought I was a professional musician, but I’d really never taken a vocal lesson in my life. But halfway through the auditions, about a month into the thing with Quiet Riot, I decided to take lessons because I didn’t want to lose that gig. Unfortunately, I did lose that one. But I stayed super hard on these lessons with this guru, Ron Anderson. Alex was still a great friend of mine. He knew I was ambitious and really trying hard to get somewhere. All of a sudden the audition for Steven Adler’s Adler’sAppetite popped up and I walked into that audition and about three songs in we were doing “Sweet Child of Mine” and I was like, Whoa! I could sing these songs”, which was something I had accepted when I was a teenager, bouncing up and down on my bed, listening to “Paradise City”, trying to sing along with that stuff. I remember how difficult it was. I just kind of said to myself, “I don’t think I’m that kind of singer. I don’t think I can hit the notes”, and then fast forward quite some time. But then that audition popped up at Steven and I joined forces right out of the gate. We did fifty-two shows in 60 days, those were two-hour sets each night. So that was just amazing. My favorite music ever was that Appetite for Destruction record and other songs, “Reckless Life” and all those ones. What a rush. But Steven and I bonded like you could only dream of bonding with anyone famous or unfamous. We just became friends. I just talked to him a couple of weeks ago. He gave us a quote for this new record, telling everybody to the world how amazing it is. So, yeah, he’s just a great friend. 4:10
“Amber Alert”
On the sonic change between records for Budderside – I think it’s kind of just becoming a little bit more authentic with what our calling is. It’s not really something that we thought of and went for. It was it’s just kind of an evolving process for Budderside as a whole. (For) the debut record I went through years and years of drug addiction and I would be hunched over my acoustic guitar and that’s really all I had to get me through those hard times. I would just write and write and write. Some of the songs off the debut record actually were pulled from those terrible days. When you have an acoustic guitar, it’s kind of like a lot of feel comes into it, a lot of melody, which I love. I love a lot of acoustic (artists). Some of my favorite artists are acoustic artists. But to get to the point, just a lot of strumming, I think a lot more strong stuff goes went into the first record. When it came time to write the second record, Spiritual Violence, I just really pushed myself to the limits. I did most of the guitar writing for the album. In fact, I think eight out of the 10 songs I wrote every bar of it musically. So I really just hunched over this time on an electric guitar. (I) really focused on what I thought would be powerful riffs. I didn’t start writing lyrics to something until I knew the music was right. So that was kind of that evolution, that part of the process that got us stepping into the studio with Jay Baumgartner, of course, who’s worked with Papa Roach and Linkin Park and every icon you can think of in the rock and roll world. (When it’s) him just staring down at you, waiting for you to get it right, puts a lot of class on it. The genre kind of really took it took focus at that point. Now going forward, it’s amazing, again, getting with these new musicians, Sam Bam Koltun and Logan (Nikolic), and Gabe (Maska), their musical integrity is so strong that I’m glad I can just put down the guitar and everything going forward. They write the music. I’ll just focus on the vocals. So more evolution coming, even more so in the next one. 6:49
“Zen”
On lyric writing – I think above all and everything else, I think I was put here and my heart is definitely in the lyrics, more so than anything else. Sometimes I try to write poetry, but I never feel like it quite strikes the chord that it can with music. There’s a lot of pressure that comes on me, I feel like I wait a little bit for the universe to open up to a subject, and then the subject has to resonate very true with me. I really have to be going through something or I have to have an experience that I can lock onto and then I just try to get brutally honest. Matt Sorum told me when I was auditioning for Velvet Revolver, he said, “Speak your truth”. Lemmy, of course, was all about that as well. His integrity. I mean, he’s legendary for that. I think I’ve always had that kind of in me. But to hear other people that have done it before you definitely solidifies the fact that that’s what’s really important, that we’re speaking our truth. So that after you do take three minutes of your day, which is a lot in today’s world, people don’t have three seconds to spend on something that’s not real. So I dig as deep as I can and every lyric is very important. Jay, specifically during this record, helped me shave off a lot of the B.S., I’m a bit too lyrical. I think you noticed that in the evolution process of lyric writing from the first record to this one, too, that it’s just sometimes you can say a lot more with a few less words. It sits better on the music. Whether it’s girlfriends or world peace or racism or whatever, when I start focusing on those songs sometimes I’ll just get in my car and I’ll drive as fast as I can down the highway at about 3:00 a.m. and I’ve been known to get a few tickets while I’ve been writing lyrics like that. When I focus the most, it’s like I crank up the music without the lyrics and I can just scream at the top of my lungs without anybody judging me or listening to me and I wait for that thing to feel right. I wait for it to sound right. Then I make sure that the lyrics are just they’re true to my story. They’re just true to me. 11:44
“Wide Awake”
On dealing with the pandemic – There was just a huge decision to be made, I think we had waited long enough (with) changing the lineup and the time in between the first and the second record, there was just this urgency just to kind of let it go. We didn’t know how long the pandemic was going to last. I felt like we were kind of pioneers because nobody was putting out new music. Everybody was telling us that (we should be) waiting till 2021, spring of ’21 was the time that people will start thinking about music. So we just decided it’s time to put this thing out. We had done, I think, three videos by that time. It was around September or so and we just said, Let’s just put this thing out. Let’s just start putting one song out every four weeks”. Took us some time to get the ball rolling. December came on and we’ve been delivering, I think, one song every four weeks. We’ve got one coming Friday again and then the album drops next week. But we know that we have what it takes to get in and write something else. So by the time this thing drops, I think that that it will have gotten where it needs to get on the Internet with everybody. I think it will reach all the people that it needs to. It’s a stepping stone towards whatever we do next. It’s painful. We’ve done three live streams. We did The Monsters of Rock live stream and a few others. The NRG one, the Wacken Worldwide one, and our Lemmy live stream. It’s tough to sit there and you give everything you got. It’s just nothing and you’ve got to pretend you’re cool, you don’t have anybody to look down and go, “Hey, oh you thought it was cool?”. There’s a huge back and forth so we miss that. In California today, they’re opening up things to twenty-five percent capacity. So let’s just pray that this thing doesn’t start to spike and then we have to close down again. But we can’t wait to get out and play this record in its fullest. We’ve still got Rocklahoma on the books at the end of the summer. So we’re hoping that we start filling in the blanks from now until Rocklahoma. 14:26
