Steve Conte is the epitome of rock n’ roll. His time with rock legends New York Dolls and Michael Monroe proves that. But he is so much more, he’s an accomplished jazz player and a prolific solo artist and about to release his latest solo record The Concrete Jangle. The record features songs written with XTC’s Andy Partridge as well as Conte’s own compositions. A little while back, Steve took some time to talk with me about the record and his career.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Steve Conte interview –
On how he hooked up with Andy Partridge – XTC has been lin my top five favorite bands since the early eighties. I grew up with the Beatles and Stones and Zeppelin and Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart and all that. Then once the eighties, the punk era happened. Instead of going punk or metal Van Halen, Van Halen and punk happened at the same time, so everybody was either doing this or pogoing. So at that moment, at that point I went into the jazz, I went to completely out of sync with what was happening and I went back to like forties and fifties jazz, like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, John Coltrane. There were very few rock bands that I liked. I only liked the most musical, it was a bit of a snobbery on my part, but I only liked the most musical rock bands. To me, they were The Police, XTC, and The Pretenders, beause I love James Honeyman-Scott.
So I had heard I guess it was English Settlement in the early 82, I guess that came out. I maybe heard it a year later, played on my college radio station by Matt Pinfield, he was a DJ at my college radio station at Rutgers. He was like, “That’s XTC “Melt the Guns”.” I ran, I got the record, and then went back and got every record before and every record since. Andy has been on my list of top 10 songwriters since then. He’s up there with Lennon, McCartney and Townsend and Costello and Jagger, Richards and all those guys.
I happened to meet producer Steve Lilywhite at a party and we became really good friends. Before that, my guitar repairman was making a guitar for Andy and I heard he was making a guitar for Andy Partridge. I said, “You’re kidding me. He’s one of my favorites. Please give him my record”. I had done this record with my brother, The Contes we were called. The record was Bleed Together. We gave that to Andy and he really liked it, but, at the time he didn’t have his own label or anything. We just heard back through the guitar maker Andy really liked the album, never had any contact with him. Then through Steve Lillywhite was chatting on Twitter with him one day and I mentioned XTC and the records and he was like, “Oh, well, you know, Andy’s on Twitter. We should rope him into this conversation”. Next thing I know I’m chatting with Andy Partridge on Twitter in full public view back and forth. He’s like, “Wait, you played in the New York Dolls?” Cause this was during that era. He said, you know, “You stole my dream job”. He said, “When I was a teen, I wanted to be the guitar player in the Dolls and I wrote David Johansen a letter”, and all this stuff. Then he heard that I was coming. So we just kind of stayed in touch and tweeted back and forth for a bit.
Then he heard that I was coming to play in Swindon where he’s from in England with Alice Cooper and Michael Monroe. He said, “I hear you’re going to be in my shithole town”. He says, “I’ll buy you lunch”. So I was like immediately screen shot that Andy Partridge is buying me lunch. I can’t believe this. So I went there to the venue. I did my soundcheck and then Andy and his engineer friend, Stuart Rowe picked me up, drove me back to their place. We had lunch. We hung out all day from between the soundcheck and my showtime and passed the guitar around back and forth and just had a bunch of laughs. We were just getting along like friends. He had given me some great quotes from my albums. I had sent him a couple of mine, the Bronx Cheer and Steve Conte NYC Album. He really liked him and gave me some great usable quotes for my promo and stuff.
Then I thought, well, here I am, it’s time to make a new record. I thought, let me see if Andy will write the single with me. So I wrote him an email. I had been hearing these interviews on YouTube where he was like swearing off writing with other people because he would write for these artists and then the songs wouldn’t get recorded, the record company or the manager or whatever would say it’s too weird or whatever, but I said, “Look, Andy, If I write a song with you, there’s no way it’s not gonna get used on my record”. So he was like, “Well, Steve, I sort of swore off writing with other people, but it’s not a no, let me think about it”. So I went home and I wrote this piece and I recorded it, real kind of Beatles-XTC production. I sent it to him and he said, “Well, that’s great, but it sounds done. I can’t really add anything to this”. He goes, “Why don’t we start something from scratch?” He said “Let’s do a zoom” because he was in England. I was in the Bronx. So that’s what we did. We did about four Zoom sessions, a couple of hours each. Instead of one song, we wrote eight songs.
On what he learned from writing with Andy – He writes unlike anyone else I’ve ever written with. He thinks and hears in visuals. When he hears music, he sees visuals and he writes from that. He’s like cinematic almost with his writing. So. There was one point where we were writing this, he also has these great methods when you’re getting stuck. We didn’t get stuck very often, but we would come up with an idea and then we’d go, “okay, let’s put that one on the side”. He knew I was going to go away and work on it and come up with some stuff and he’s like, “Let’s do something else”. He said, “What song do you wish you had written?” And I said, “Oh, “King Midas In Reverse” by the Hollies”. He was like, “Ooh, that’s a good one”. I knew he would like it too. It’s one of my favorite songs. So for some reason, I think it was on that song. He started playing this chord. I don’t know if you can hear this. It’s like an F chord with an open G string. So it’s an F add nine. He’s like, “Wow, that sounds like a bell”. And we wrote this song called “One Last Bell” because he thought that the guitar’s sound and the chord reminded him of a bell ringing. Then it’s the songwriter’s job to figure out what are you going to write about a bell, right? So then we came up with this whole idea about the bell ringing the truth in and the age of lies, this is wishful thinking, of course. Misinformation being over and that this bell is bringing in the truth. That’s how that song came about.
So he writes like that. He says, “What does that sound like?” What kind of picture does that bring up? If you ever read any of his interviews about his own songs, that’s what he says. “Senses Working Overtime” the XTC song, he said he heard, somehow it sounded medieval to him. So he started writing about straw for the donkeys and this farm kind of sound. He’s, he’s unique in that way. Never wrote with anyone like him before.
On if his solo songs were older material or written for this project – There’s one that goes all the way back to 1984. When I was just four years old in fact, it was my second single “Girl With No Name”. I wrote that right around the time that XTC was making, I guess, probably between Mummer and The Big Express. I was very influenced by XTC during that era and Beatles, of course, and Motown. So it’s got a little of all that stuff in it. But there’s a song called “I Dream Her”, which is the one that I sent him to see if he’d be interested in writing the single with me. I finished it myself. It’s very kind of psychedelic and Beatle-ish. So that was a newer one. I have one called “I’m Decomposing A Song For You” that’s also very Beatles, XTC. I had that hanging around for just a year or two. I’m trying to think if I had anything that I wrote from scratch knowing that I was writing with him. Most of them were within the few years prior to the project. Except “Girl With No Name”, which was 30 years old or whatever.
On if there is one genre he feels best suites his playing – If I could, and I’ve been trying to distill that into one thing for my whole life, if I could write an album of songs that had the energy of punk rock with the musicality, with the lyrical poetry of Andy Partridge and the Beatles and, Dylan and then the jazz guitar lines of John Schofield or somebody. No one that I know of has ever been able to do that. It’s still my dream to do that before I die. I’m getting a little closer on every album.
There’s my new single “Shoot Out The Stars”. I actually managed to slip a couple of bebop jazz riffs in the solo. Which I haven’t really heard anyone do. I love certain kind of energy. That’s what I think hopefully makes me different. Most rock guys think jazz sounds like a bunch of wrong notes, so they don’t usually do play or they think it’s too fancy or whatever and most jazz guys think rock is too loud and dumb so those two don’t meet over on that side and so I’d like to somehow combine all those things and great songwriting, energy, and musicality.
When I work with Michael Monroe. We just started recording a new album and it’s pretty varied now. I was able to sneak a couple of my Beatley things in there, but in the past it’s been like keep it dumb, keep it punk rock, keep it simple three chords. I definitely can’t or I haven’t been able to bring in too much crazy stuff. But this time I did bring in a couple of weird things that surprisingly made it to the, well, made it to the recording sessions anyway, whether they make the record, we don’t know yet.
On getting the call to play in New York Dolls – It’s been well documented I didn’t really. know any of the songs, which probably sounds like blasphemous to Dolls fans. “How did this guy get the gig? It should have been me.” Johansen was at the point where he’d played with so many great musicians since the Dolls, he had great players in all his solo bands and he was working with Jimmy Vivino who is a friend of mine and Larry Saltzman who’s a friend of mine. They played in his bands the Harry Smith’s and Jimmy was working with him and Levon Helm of The Band. So he asked those guys. He said, “I’m putting the Dolls back together. Who should I call?” They said, oh “Don’t call anyone else. Call Conte. He’s he’s got the right look. He’s got the right guitars and he’s a pro.” So Johansen was used to working with with pros. He wasn’t going to get some garage band guy just because he sounded like (Johnny) Thunders. But I did my homework, and I realized what it was that Thunders did and I distilled it down to Chuck Berry and Keith Richards with the amp turned up to 11.
On if Sammi Yaffa playing with the Dolls led to his connection to Michael Monroe – Of course. Yeah. The two of them were in Hanoi Rocks together since Sammi was a kid. The Dolls had played in Michael’s hometown of Turku, Finland, where he was living at the time in 2009. Michael brought a saxophone and he came on stage and played “Human Being” with us, I think, or it was some Doll’s tune that had a saxophone. Maybe it was “Personality Crisis”, I don’t remember. But I met Michael and I guess Sammi started rekindling an old friendship with him. Next thing I knew, the two of those guys were working on a new project. The Dolls work was starting to slow down and I just had a kid and I was like, “Man, I need to work”. Sammi called and said, “Do you want to come and play some gigs with Michael?” I said, “Sure. I need the gig”. So I went, I played with Michael and and they offered me the gig and I thought I was going to be able to do both. Actually me and Sammi both were thinking we could be in both bands, but then the management went ahead and booked a Doll’s recording session for a new record on the same day that we were scheduled to go in and start recording a record with Michael, so we couldn’t do it and then they got other guys and then that was sort of the the end. Sammi was my connection to Michael and now it’s been 15 years this year? No, 14 years this year. It’s the longest I’ve ever been in any one band.
On Michael Monroe’s status out of the US – Oh, well, in Finland, he’s a legend and he’s a star, and he’s on TV, he’s got books out, he’s on the The Voice, The Voice of Finland. The Voice TV show. He was a judge on The Voice, and now he’s got a documentary about his life. To be famous like that in a small country like Finland, we’ve somehow been able to, it’s an amazing thing. It would be impossible, I think to do here in the States because it’s so huge. Plenty of bands have done it, but it was a long time ago that they did it. Aerosmith and these rock bands don’t come out now and get that big here in the U. S. As we know, it’s all about hip hop and all that modern stuff.
He’s a legend and as he should be. He gets out there, gives 200%, just wrapping the mic around his neck and climbing up on the lighting trusses and doing splits and harmonica and saxophone. Singing and fronting and just looking amazing every night. So of course they’re going absolutely insane for him in Japan. We have our pockets. The biggest markets are Finland, Japan, England. Then we sort of dabble in Sweden and Norway, and then, Italy and Spain and Germany. Not many others, we’ve done South America once. We’ve done the States twice in 14 years, but, it’s amazing where we’ve been able to keep up the work in Finland, we just got to keep putting out new albums.
On upcoming plans – I just put together a new band and we have our first shows coming up. Being in Connecticut, maybe you know about this already. Do you know about my new Haven show? (note: the show was postponed) In May, I’m going to play Joey Ramone’s birthday bash here in Manhattan and as many other gigs as I can get before I have to leave for the summer to go play with Michael in Europe. That’s really what happens every summer. I don’t have a job, that’s my job. My the summers are for European touring. Then I come home and I do my own stuff during the year.
On how to get The Concrete Jangle on vinyl – So record store day is April 20th, 420 for you pot smokers. What you need to do, if you’re interested in getting a copy, it’s going to be exclusive on Record Store Day. It comes out on vinyl exclusive for 30 days. It’s not going to be available physical product anywhere else. I think maybe you can get a download somewhere, but if you want the physical product, you got to call up your local independent record store and ask them to order you a copy of The Concrete Jangle and then go on Record Store Day to the store and pick up your copy.
