Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal is one of the most versatile guitarists on the planet. From the straight-up hard rock of Guns N’ Roses to the complex prog rock of Sons of Apollo, Thal has done it all. He has a new prog metal band featuring Derek Sherinian, Dino Jelusick, Bruno Valverde, and Yas Nomura called Whom Gods Destroy (possibly named after a classic Star Trek episode?) that has just released their monster debut record. Recently, Thal took some time to talk all about it.
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On how Whom Gods Destroy came together – Well, it was right after we quickly got off the road in early 2020. We got in about four shows out of 20 of them that we were supposed to do in Europe (with Sons of Apollo) and then had to get out of there and get home and there’s a world shut down and everything. So the plan was to start making a third Sons of Apollo album. Derek and I started writing and soon after we realized that not everybody was on board to do a third album and we just kept on writing and it became this new band.
So, it was 2020. We started writing. I remember Derek came up with the intro to “In the Name of War”. I was like, “Oh, interesting”. Then I took the idea of it and made like a heavy (part) which became the first and then itwas like, “Oh, let’s just make it a straight beat on it”. Then it came up with just everything, just taking that original theme and making variations of it and branches of that branch, and it became a song. Then realizing that the band Sons of Apollo wasn’t going to continue and started writing over again. I wrote the lyrics to the chorus and came up with that. “I try and I try, but I can never win. You break me and make me start over again”. Then that was our second song. By that point, I started talking to Dino. Then about a year later Yas and then Bruno and it just slowly came together. We were all connected anyway. Dino and Yas did music together. I did something with Felipe Andreoli, the bassist of Angra and Dino and my own solo drummer, Kyle Hughes, incredible drummer, wonderful guy. So we did something together during the pandemic and just everybody had some kind of connection. That’s how the music world is, very few degrees of separation between anybody and everybody.
So it just all came together and showed it to the label and they’re like, “This is a little heavier than Sons of Apollo.” But that’s what, for me, I always felt like Sons of Apollo could push a little harder, a little further, sweat a little more. With this band, that was the chance to do it and to just turn all the intensity knobs up a little bit, make the heavy stuff heavier, the proggy stuff, proggier, or just make it more intense, and I think it happened with this album. The new blood that came in, Bruno and Yas, that added a different energy than Sons of Apollo had. So two of the ingredients in the bowl are the same and three new ones. It’s not going to be exactly the same. So, yeah, I feel like this album for me is more what I dig. Just wackier and just more of a pummeling and bombardment and just the intensity.
On if it is difficult to manage egos to get what’s best for the song – Well, there is no “best”, it’s just opinion, it’s just everyone feels this is what expresses me, and this is what expresses me, and this is what expresses me. I always say, if you have a band of five people, if you get 20 percent of what you want, then it’s fair. Otherwise, you’re getting too much and you’re taking away from someone else. So, you have to be okay with that, or do a solo album if you’re not. Then you can have a hundred percent and you can do everything you want and call all the shots. People need to do that because a band, a band can’t be everything for everyone. To fill the void, it’s good to have other things that, that can fill it rather than trying to push the band to be what you want to be. out of a solo band and have it be a hundred percent of everything you want it to be. That’s when people are going to fight over creative differences and stuff, because they’re all trying to make it what they want it to be and not saying, “Well, I am just one piece of this, and as long as I’m giving full as that piece, I gotta leave room for everyone else. This has to be theirs too. Otherwise it’s not going to work”.
So with Sons of Apollo, the music was written by me and Derek. We would just take ideas and send them to each other back and forth. It was the same with this. This band came about the same way. It came out of Sons of Apollo. So if there is a next album, then we would have everyone building it from the ground up. It would be even more of an expression of Yas and Dino and Bruno. Yeah. I mean, even still, Dino, he wrote his stuff, and it should be that way. Singer should sing the words from their own mouth, not from someone else’s mouth. I don’t know if everyone agrees with that, but for me, it’s the preference. If it can’t be that, fine. There’s some singers who are great performers, but they’re not great writers or they’re good at this, but not good at that. If you ask them to be things they’re not just to fit the idea in your head of what someone should be, that’s not going to work either. So, whatever everyone is good at, if someone is great at performing but they’re just not comfortable with writing, don’t try to push them to write because they’re just going to be very uncomfortable in the band. So just let everyone be who they are.
On if it helps having a vocalist who understands what the band is doing musically – (Dino) was a great fit for the sounds, but I have to give props to Soto, to Jeff Scott Soto. I’m in a band with him too, and, and that band is heavier than it used to be and Jeff made that fit perfectly. He did some heavy singing on that album, on the Art of Anarchy album. So what it comes down to is whatever ingredient you throw into the bowl, that’s what it’s going to taste like. Dino is a perfect fit for the music because it is what it is because he’s part of it.
Same thing with Art of Anarchy, Jeff is a perfect fit for that because he does what he does in that and it is what it is because of him. It comes down to the same thing. If you’re dealing with good people. It’s gonna be good. Whatever it ends up sounding like, it’s gonna be good. Each person creates a contrast. You work together, yet you also contrast. Everyone brings something different. That’s what makes every band fucking great, is that you have people that are different, that bring it together. Derek and I, musically, are different. I like being very off the wall, I’m like, “What the fuck is that?” And he loves Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, and Rainbow, Dio. So you put the two together. It works. If you take one away, it’s lopsided.
On what he gains from using a fretless neck on his guitar – Well, you can drag and slide notes and chords and things. It’s like speaking a different language in a way. On a regular guitar, the stuff just wouldn’t sound the same. It just wouldn’t have all the dragging, descending, vocal kind of things that happen in there. Well, let’s talk about the guitar. It’s fretted on the bottom neck and it’s drop D tuning. and fretless on the top neck, which is in drop B tuning. So it’s kind of two different tunings, a little bit. For a lot of the stuff on the album, what I’m doing is I’m doing riffs on the fretless, a lot of stuff on that low tuned-down string, and I’m adding an octave pedal. to make it even an octave lower, and just dragging all these low notes around, it just sounds like a very just nasty low voice, just rawr, doing this thing. It’s just the sound I imagined for this. Not having exact, precise tones to everything. Just those little things in there that happen all throughout, like “Over Again”, those drags of things. It just wouldn’t work on a fretted instrument. It wouldn’t sound right and it makes you write a different way. It makes you come up with different rifts. It’s just a bit of a difference. It’s a different language. So I’m just adding this little bit of another language to the parts and it’s fun.
On if there is a different satisfaction from a solo project as opposed to a band – Totally. Each one gives you one that the other can’t give you. So with a band, you’re getting input, ideas that you wouldn’t have imagined, and it becomes something more than what you could have done yourself. But at the same time, when you’re doing your own thing, you get to get every bit of yourself out, and you need to do that. So, having both, to me, it’s just, you got to do both. If you’re not doing one, you get the itch for the other, because each one gives you something. So the last solo album I did was 2015. Then that year also put out first Art of Anarchy album, then started working on the next one and put out the second one in 2017 as we started up with Sons of Apollo and got that album out later that year. 2018 just touring like crazy, 2019 writing the second Sons of Apollo album while doing, working with Asia, and then 2020 getting that album out. Meanwhile, in 2019 doing more producing, recorded the first Dodie’s album, and then got that out in 2021, put out two acoustic albums in 2020, and started working on Gods Destroy in 2020, as well as more producing, Art of Anarchy stuff, which both of those came out now and working on a solo album and put out a second Dodies album in 2022. And this year we’ll get out the third Dodies album. You’re probably wondering, “Who the hell’s the Dodies”. I have to tell you about that.
So this year will be third Art of Anarchy album out, debut from God’s Destroy album. My own solo album of crazy instrumental shit is gonna come out after I get those two done. My album has been done since June of last year and I’m just holding off and just slowly getting all the release stuff ducks in a row. Let me get the transcriptions ready for the transcription book, and I’m working on video for the first song and all that stuff while getting these two albums out rather than slowing down these bands where other people are waiting on me. So focusing fully on those and then my album will come out.
The Dodies are this incredible duo, it’s this garage rock duo that have this incredible musical sense that reminds me of old grunge, like the more musical Nirvana-type stuff and Radiohead and things like that. They’re just so musical, but so noisy in a good way. They do so much, just two dudes. You got a drummer that plays the entire drum set with just one arm while playing bass on a keyboard with his left hand and singing backing vocals, he grooves and he’s solid. The guitar player also sings and every once in a while the drummer, he keeps his extra drumstick on top of his keyboard and he’ll just grab it and play both arms. In those moments, the guitar player kicks on an octave pedal that runs to a bass amp and becomes both a guitar and bass at once. They just have this big sound. I just love this band. So this is the third album that we’ve recorded together and I’m just producing, which is really my biggest love. It’s what I want my future to be is producing and teaching. That’s always what I’ve loved. I want to be off the field. I want to be the coach and I want to help other people. get on the field. That’s who I am. I’m too damn old to run around on stage. So, even if other people older than me do it, well, God bless them, but I’m too damn old.
On what led him to bring back Art of Anarchy – It had a very turbulent history, this band, horribly just making the same mistakes twice. So during the pandemic the twin brothers that started the band and they’re old friends of mine for like over 25 years. It didn’t even start as a band. It started off where they just wanted to make their dream album. I used to record all their bands when they were younger and everything. So they would come to my studio. This is in 2011 and we would record. I was their producer and I’ll throw some extra guitar on there. The idea was to have different singers all sing different songs and just have the album of their music with all their favorite singers on it. The first one to lay something down was Scott Weiland. Then his manager said to us, “Let’s make this a band. We want to make this a band. Scott will do the whole album, we’ll promote it and we’ll do everything and this will be a band.” So they’re not going to say no to Scott Weiland. He wants to make a band with them, they’re like, “Hell yeah”. It became a band at that point. So, they wanted me to be in it. I was like, “All right, I’ll be in it”. We asked John Moyer on bass. He’s like, “Sure, I’ll do it. Sounds like fun”. So now it’s this band with a member of Guns N Roses, Scott Weiland, a member of Disturbed. So that’s how it became a band.
Then once we were putting it out, Scott Weiland just pulled the rug out and surprised us and said, “Oh, I wish you luck finding a new singer”. It’s like, what the fuck? So that obviously didn’t work out. So then onto singer number two, just so I don’t have to go back into therapy, I’m going to gloss over that. Then during the pandemic, the brothers, the Votta brothers that founded their band, their vision. I’m a supportive friend and help them with their vision, they had a bunch of songs that they were writing and working on. So every Friday they would come over and we would record a song. We did that throughout the pandemic and had two albums worth of music. While that was going on and Sons of Apollo was not looking good, Jeff said to me, Soto, said, “You should have just had me sing. in the band from the beginning. You would have saved yourself a lot of grief”. I was like, “You’re right”. I mentioned it to the brothers and they said, “Well, if he wants in, he’s in”, He wants it in, so he was in and he started writing to the music and, and, and here we are. So Sons of Apollo split off into having Art of Anarchy with Jeff and Whom Gods Destroy with Derek split into two bands.
On the future of Whom Gods Destroy – The goal with every band is to keep making music and to get out and play. That’s pretty much why you do it. You don’t make a band so it can break up and you can’t see it through, but someone always fucks it up. So it’s hard to keep a marriage of a bunch of unemployable nut jobs together. But anyway., I’ll just say hopefully what I’d like to see happen is we get out there and just do what a band does. We make plans and gods, god laughs. We make plans and gods destroy.
