In the late 1980s, Chris Impellitteri quickly established himself as one of the world’s premiere shredders: A badge of honor he proudly wears to this day. Although he and his namesake band never ascended past cult status in their native United States, they’ve sold millions of albums worldwide and are a full blown stadium headliner in Japan. Now, for the first time ever, Impellitteri’s catalog is being celebrated with a career spanning anthology entitled Wake the Beast. We sat down with Impellitteri to discuss his formative years, being a global superstar, and what the future holds for he and his band.
Greetings Chris and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Chris Impellitteri: I’m doing great! Thank you for having me. I’ve just thinking that I’ve been around for 35 years. Woah, I’m a dinosaur *laughs*!
*laughs* Well just to be sure I have been pronouncing it correctly my whole life, it is Im-pell-it-teri, correct?
CI: It is! You did it perfect. I try to explain to people that the easiest way to break the name apart is in three parts. It’s “Impell”, similar to “compel”, “I compel you to do something.” The word “it”, and then the girl’s name “Teri”. Put it all together and you’ve got Impellitteri.
Perfect!
CI: It’s the world’s most difficult band name ever. That should probably go in the Guinness Book of World Records for the worst or most difficult band name to pronounce, Impellitteri. Most people think, “What’s that disease?” *laughs*
Well when you came onto the scene, there must’ve been somebody thinking, “This can’t be harder to pronounce than Yngwie Malmsteen.”
CI: Maybe? I don’t know *laughs*.
We’re about a week away from the release of this new anthology, Wake the Beast. When did the idea for such a collection first come about?
CI: We thought for years that when we get our legal rights back to our albums, meaning when we could legally release the music outside of specific countries, we’d do this. We have a new guy managing the band, Giles Lavery. For years we did the management ourselves, so this is a person who’s really passionate about the band, a great visionary. He brought it to our attention that we should do this anthology, get our records released for all of the other countries that have never had access to our music without exporting or importing, which is really expensive. It was his idea conceptually, so thank God we were able to get our rights back. Legally, we could no release our music outside of the territories we were licensed with. Once that came to fruition, we realized it was time to do this. That began the process and how we evolved into getting this anthology created.
What territories were those? Was it mostly Asia?
CI: Yeah, Japan and certain places in continental Europe, and of course all of Asia. We’ve had an amazing relationship with our label in Japan, which is JVC Victor. They’ve had us since 1991. Before that, we were with Sony Entertainment. So we have nothing but the utmost respect for JVC Victor. We just realized over the years that what happened is the band, probably by luck, somehow we got really, really popular in Japan. The band just blew up.
Because of that, our popularity and success started to overflow into other countries. A lot of metal kids around the world started getting interested in who we are. So they started buying our records on export and the “Impellitterri disease” expanded *laughs*. Over the years, we’ve had so many people go, “Man, we love your music, but we hate paying these prices.” As an artist, it makes you feel really bad. You’re like, “Ugh, I know.”
How did you go about picking the songs for this release? With 11 albums and the debut EP to your name, that must’ve been a tedious task.
CI: It wasn’t as hard as you think because over the years, especially when we tour and play live and do the big metal festivals in Europe or Japan, we get a sense of what people like. Over the years, kids would rip a file and put it up on YouTube. Of course the label would usually take it down, but before they did, I’d get to read the comments. You kind of now if kids are like, “Man, this is the greatest thing ever.”, you’re onto something. But if the comments are saying, “Dude, you guys suck. What do people see in this band?” Maybe that’s not the right song *laughs*. The reality is, over time, the fans have given us their input of what they really love as far as our music. That’s what got compiled on this anthology.
I’m glad you mentioned YouTube. As a 23 year old, a lot of my favorite bands I discovered growing up were via YouTube. Unfortunately, my generation didn’t have the luxury of going to a record store and discovering new music based off its cover art like the old days. What are your thoughts on YouTube and the internet in general in terms of exposing your music to a larger audience?
CI: Yeah, the digital realm is good and evil. There’s pros and cons to it. As far as our reach and accessibility, there’s no doubt it’s a pro. People in South Africa and other far away countries watch our music videos now and become fans because they just go on YouTube, type in our name, and here comes our music videos. That’s amazing because in the old days, when we first started…it’s funny. I was younger than you when we did the first Impellitteri EP. Stand in Line I was your age. At that point, if you weren’t signed to a major label, you might be a bar band, but unfortunately, you had very little chance of success.
Thank God we were on a major label and we got signed. Today, although you don’t need it, it does help you because they still got a support mechanism and an infrastructure that can distribute your product, get you media attention, etc. But YouTube and all the digital media outlets helped you bypass that as well. You can really do it organically, although it’s hard because there are millions of people out there trying to vie for your attention.
It’s appropriate that this collection coincides with the 35th anniversary of your self titled debut EP. What are your memories of making that EP? Had Relativity signed you prior to its recording?
CI: I have very clear memories of that. When we did the Impellitteri EP, there was no label deal. I had come to California. Soon after, Rob Rock (Impellitteri singer) came out to California. Like all young kids, we came out as teenagers and wanted to be rockstars, not for the fame and fortune and the girls. That’s an insular thing. We were musicians at heart, but we wanted to succeed. It’s what we do. We believed in ourselves. I remember we had a very small budget, not a lot of money. But we saved our money and worked our asses off, practicing, writing, and coming up with the greatest music we could come up with.
We would rehearse with our band as a live band. I remember we used to rehearse in this place called Mates Rehearsal Studio. We still kind of do. Once we got those 4 songs together and really mastered them, we went into a place called Baby’O Recording Studio in Hollywood, California. I’ll never forget this because when we were tracking, we were pretty much doing it live. Again, we had to do it fast because we didn’t have a lot of money. Our engineer was named Mikey Davis, and at the same time he was working with us in studio A, he was working with another artist in studio B across the wall. He’d have to run 20 feet. It was actually Gene Simmons of KISS. So Mikey was working with Impellitteri on the EP, and then he’d run across the hall and do some changes on EQ or whatever for Gene who was doing KISS demos.
I’ll never forget that we were doing that and Gene Simmons actually came in and introduced himself. I was shredding, doing some crazy tapping stuff. I remember Gene said something to the effect of, “Don’t you know any Clapton?” “What do you mean?” “You know.” And he starts singing the riff to “Sunshine of Your Love”. I go, “Yeah, of course!” He comes around my back and literally plays the riff on my guitar. As a kid, obviously Van Halen was my biggest influence, but I was also a KISS fan. That was my first experience doing a record and going, “Wow, is this what L.A. is like? Rockstars coming across to say hello?” It was wild! Of course, that Impellitteri EP immediately got us this amazing cult following around the world. It certainly got us a lot of attention, which eventually got us signed.
Which of course led to your debut album, Stand in Line. This incarnation of the band was essentially a supergroup featuring Graham Bonnet on vocals, Chuck Wright on bass, Pat Torpey on drums, and Philip Wolfe on keyboards. How did that lineup come to be?
CI: We did some live shows in support of the Impellitteri EP and we did a lot of interviews. I remember Kerrang! gave us 5 out of 5 stars, called me “the next guitar hero”, all this silly stuff. We had a lot of positive motion going on where the band was really starting to build this following. Our singer Rob Rock sat me down and said, “Look dude. I love you and love what we’re doing, but I want to go in a different direction.” I was like, “Uh oh.” He decided to go work with a band in Germany because they were being produced by Dieter Dierks who produced Scorpions.
So Rob went that direction and we had just signed a deal. I was like, “Oh my God. I’m in trouble. What do I do?” The label wanted a new record and the singer, who’s 50% of the sound of the band, is gone. I was freaking out. Luckily, I was friends with Graham Bonnet. Graham had played with Rainbow and Alcatrazz and a lot of really big bands. We crossed paths and as Rob quit, Graham was ending Alcatrazz. He was like, “Hey man, what are you doing?” “I’m bummed. I lost my singer. I don’t know what we’re gonna do.” “Well I’m done with Alcatrazz.” We started talking and you know where it went. So we got together and we wrote a few songs.
The first song we wrote was “Stand in Line”, which became the album’s title track. At that point, it was only Graham and I. I was proceeding very cautiously because if you listen to Impellitteri, especially the EP, people have said we’re borderline thrash, with the screaming vocals and all the technical shredding guitar solos, but at heart, we’re a hardcore metal band. But with Stand in Line, I wasn’t sure if I could go in that direction with Graham. Instead, as we were writing, we said, “Why don’t we do a tribute to what you did with Rainbow?” I was a big fan of Rainbow, although it’s not really Impellitteri. To this day, to be honest, I kind of wish we didn’t call it Impellitteri. I love “Stand in Line”. I love “Tonight I Fly”, but for me, if you listen to Impellitteri records, they’re massive. They’re big sounding and powerful. If I listen to Stand in Line, albeit it worked for the time, it’s much smaller sounding to me, but I think Graham Bonnet shined.
The label ended up building these other guys around us. Pat Torpey, God rest his soul, was an insanely talented drummer. Most people don’t know that he actually played with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. He had worked with some big, big people, and he was really responsible for a lot of the positive outcomes of Stand in Line. I was really young. These guys were way older than me. Pat helped with the arrangements. He was in the studio all the time. But either way, the label built the band around it. Eventually we did the song “Stand in Line” and the music video. It got a lot of attention around the world.
You mention that it could’ve come out under another name. Was there ever any talk of it being a fourth Alcatrazz album?
CI: No. I’ve heard people say it could be an Alcatrazz record because it’s Graham. I’ve heard people say it’s one of Graham Bonnet’s best vocal performances on record, and I get it. Graham was just all over that record. So was Pat, Chuck, and those guys. I almost took backseat of that. I love the song “Stand in Line”. We play it live and people go crazy over it. I love the crazy solo we did, but there’s things about the record I don’t like. The guy who mixed the record buried my guitar solos in all this reverb. You listen to those tracks dry and they sound amazing. By the time it was mixed, for me, it was not my cup of tea. I’ve heard people say, “Wow, but on all your other records…” and I know, like Venom. You can tell we’re back to what we did with the EP. It’s such a different sound, but Stand in Line served a purpose. It also blew up in Japan and we went right to stardom there.
Come the release of 1992’s Grin and Bear It, Rob Rock returned to the fold and, with the exception of a few years off, has sang for Impellitteri ever since. How would you describe your creative relationship?
CI: It’s a very strong creative force. Rob and I played in a band called Vice. It was a club band when we were in our teenage years in New England, like Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, all these places. We would play 5 to 7 nights a week, playing covers and original music. Because we had to learn cover music, we had to learn from the same artists, whether it’s Van Halen, Ozzy, or whatever. We had to learn how these other artists composed music. He learned how they crafted their lyrics and wrote vocal melodies. I learned how they structured songs. Because we came from that same school, so to speak, when we write today, because we were trained under the same circumstance, we write very naturally together. When I write music, I hear his voice in my head and I know what he’s gonna sing before he sings it. 90% of the time, he ends up singing exactly what I think he’s gonna sing. It’s just that chemistry.
In the mid to late 90s, the band released a string of classic albums with Answer to the Master, Screaming Symphony, and Eye of the Hurricane, all of which are highlighted on this collection. As we all know, this era wasn’t kind to traditional metal and hard rock bands. What are your thoughts on those years and how did Impellitteri weather the storm?
CI: I would definitely say weathering the storm was really hard work, dedication, and sticking to our guns. I call this a gift from God. In the late 80s, our kind of music…now we were never a hair band, so we never fit in with those guys, but we were metal. Towards the latter half of the 80s, after MTV decided to start playing a different type of music, and it was on the radio too, it went from metal to grunge: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, all that. A lot of our peers, especially in the metal community, they died. They really struggled.
We got really lucky because Japan, with the Impellitteri EP and Stand in Line, our popularity just exploded. Again, I don’t know why because I don’t think we’re better than anybody else. I think maybe right place, right time, right type of music. Our music touched a nerve or struck a chord and people embraced it. When our type of music was blacklisted in America, in Japan, we’re selling all these records, we’re selling out these massive venues.
I’ll never forget, I think it was on the Answer to the Master tour. One of our crew guys or our road manager was from Def Leppard, people like that, so we had a lot of big people working with us. We flew into Tokyo and were doing 3 nights sold out. I remember we arrived 2 days early. The first night we got off the plane, our road manager said, “Hey, we’re gonna go see Bush.” Bush was this massive band in America at the time. I think Gwen Stefani of No Doubt married the main guy (Gavin Rossdale). They were selling millions of records, massive in America and Europe. We go to the venue and they’re playing the same venue we’re playing in 2 days. We went to go to the show and it was cancelled. Our road manager came back and told us, “It got cancelled because they couldn’t sell tickets.”
It put things in perspective. Wow, here’s Impellitteri with Answer to the Master, sold out 3 nights in a row. And then here’s Bush, who’s massive compared to us in America and Europe, couldn’t sell tickets. It tells you we got really lucky in Japan all of a sudden. We sold a tremendous amount of records. Our tours were selling out. We were on the cover of the guitar magazines. I think I even won “Best Rock Guitarist” for Screaming Symphony. It was surreal. Why are we having so much success here, when a lot of our peers are not? In the 90s, it was an amazing run for us there.
The 90s must’ve been an interesting time for metal in Japan, especially considering their biggest band was X Japan. I figure bands in that vein, whether it be Impellitteri or the euro power metal bands, would’ve fared a lot better out there than any western countries.
CI: Yeah, some of our labelmates were also huge, like Helloween. They were a really big band at that point. Like I said, with us, we stayed with our formula, which is really the return to our Impellitteri EP, especially when Rob returned for Answer to the Master, Screaming Symphony. That’s our sound and Japan just embraced it. From Japan, that branched out into other places in Asia, which again, started selling a lot of records there. And then kids around the world, especially in continental Europe, started buying our exports. We started really making a name in the underground.
Speaking of Japan, I know your success there led to your involvement in a project named Animetal USA. When were you approached with that project and do you have a favorite anime movie or TV series?
CI: Well it’s gotta be Dragon Ball Z. As for the project, we were approached by Sony Music. Sony came to us and said, “There was a very famous Japanese supergroup in the early 90s that did this thing called Animetal.” It was very successful and the label always wanted to do an American version of it, so they handpicked the guys in the band. It originally started out with Scott Travis, the drummer of Judas Priest, Rudy Sarzo, who had played with Ozzy and Whitesnake and a host of other great bands, Mike Vescera, who was actually the singer of Loudness, and they were looking for a lead guitarist who would fit whatever their criteria was. Somehow, they decided it was me.
They contacted me and at first I was like, “I don’t know.” *laughs* I don’t like to stray from my own band and I rarely ever do, but they approached me with it and I thought, “Okay.” Rudy was really, really passionate about it. I love Scott as a player so I said, “Alright, I’m game. Let’s see what it does.” That was it. We committed and got together. We started working out the music for quite some time and it was not easy because what we were doing was adding our own solos and our original metal riffs, but it had to be based around anime music that was already written.
Japanese composers write completely different than what I’m used to writing because I’m westernized. We have a certain formula or format, the way we write. We’ll start with maybe a riff or hook, go into the full band intro, do a verse, pre-chorus, re-intro, repeat that, finally get to the bridge, and then do a solo. In Japan, nothing ever repeats, so it’s really complex. But we did that and in Japan, it was another one of those things where it was like “Woah.” As soon as we released the first record, it went gold. Our first show was in front of 18,000 people. It was just crazy. We were on shows like Good Morning Japan.
Many shredders of your era ended up in a band at one point or another, whether it be Steve Vai in Whitesnake, Joe Satriani briefly in Deep Purple, and so on. Did any major bands ever approach you to join them?
CI: Yeah, dangerously I’ve opened my mouth and said stuff because some very big people have called me. Yes, I’ve had offers to play guitar. I don’t want to say who they are because then I’ll feel like I’m just namedropping for popularity. The answer is yes, but Impellitteri is my band. When I say my band, I’ve never been a solo artist, so it’s not “The Chris Impellitteri Ego Guitar Show”. What I mean by “my band”, like with Rob Rock, it’s his band. It’s what we’re loyal to. We feel comfortable and at home being in Impellitteri versus playing someone else’s music.
What are Impellitteri’s plans moving forward? Can the fans expect any new music on the horizon?
CI: Yeah, we’re working on a new record right now. We’ve been in the studio for a few months. We’ve probably got another 3 or 4 months before we’ll be complete, maybe a little longer. We’re planning on releasing a new record maybe mid or towards the summer of 2023 and then go out and play live dates.
Wake the Beast – The Impellitteri Anthology is available now on Global Rock Records. For more information on Impellitteri, visit www.impellitteri.net.