When “Rock” is your middle name, one can only expect a legacy of timeless albums, badass riffage, and deafening volume to back it up. David “Rock” Feinstein has all three in spades, first playing metal before it was metal with his cousin Ronnie James Dio in Elf, then spending the better part of 45 years “Hot City” rockin’ with beloved power trio, The Rods. Hot off the heels of the first Rods album in five years, Rattle the Cage, we sat down with this “Wild Dog” to discuss the secrets behind an unforgettable riff, 40 years of Let Them Eat Metal, and Cousin Ronnie.
Greetings David and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
David “Rock” Feinstein: I’m happy to be here today! Thank you.
I’d like to start by congratulating you on another excellent Rods album, Rattle the Cage.
DRF: Thank you! I’m really happy with it too. It’s a little bit different than the records that we’ve done in the past, but I think it’s more mature for us. I think that in the songwriting, I kind of lean towards that a little bit. In the last couple years of writing, I was trying to be a little bit more mature in the writing and developing of the band. I want to keep it so we don’t lose the identity of the band that we’ve had for a lot of years, but yet keep the songwriting in a little bit more of a mature vision.
How soon after the band’s last album, Brotherhood of Metal, did work get started on this one?
DRF: As a writer, I’m constantly coming up with different riffs, different ideas. I use my phone mostly. It could be anytime of day or night. I don’t really sit down at any particular time and say, “Well, this is gonna be my songwriting time.” I could be driving around in the car and get an idea for a title or a lyric or a riff or anything. I just pick up my phone and hum it into my phone so I don’t forget it. Then, when I’m sitting around with a guitar and I think, “I’ll come up with something.”, I listen back at my ideas that I had on my phone and maybe one of them catches me.
Some of them obviously turn out to be eh, “Why did I ever think of that? That sucks! That’s terrible!” *laughs* But anyways, I’m doing that all the time. I think right after that album ended, there was probably other songs that I had in the works at the time and I just continued to finish them. In fact, I’ve got six songs completed now for another Rods album after Rattle the Cage. I’m hoping that we can do another album after this. It’s a continual thing for me. Occupies those brain cells, the ones that I have left! *laughs*
When I interviewed (drummer) Carl (Canedy) a couple years ago, he said that the initial title for this album was to be Shockwave. What led to the change?
DRF: Carl had an idea on this last album. Shockwave was actually Carl’s title. Carl sent me a message and said, “I got a great title! I think it’s a great title for a song. See what you can do with it.” So he sent me the title Shockwave and he sent me a couple little ideas for lines in the song. When I heard “Shockwave”, I thought, “What can I write about? I can’t really come up with a concept for “Shockwave”.” It was hard for me to tell a story about “Shockwave”. It was really actually pretty difficult for me, but it was Carl’s title and I thought it was a good title. I wanted to do something with it and I wanted to make something out of it. As it turned out, it came out good.
So at the time, I didn’t have some of the other songs done. I think Carl just thought, “Hey, Shockwave is a great title. Let’s call the album Shockwave.” It was early on. The other thing with Shockwave is that when you think about doing an album cover…we’ve continued on with the three-headed dog for a long time, so when you think about doing an album artwork for Shockwave, it’s really kind of difficult. It’s probably as difficult as trying to come up with a concept for lyrics to put a song together.
I think as time went on, the idea of having Shockwave as the title really didn’t happen. In fact, Rattle the Cage was another title that Carl had sent me like he did Shockwave. He said, “Rattle the Cage is a great title.” Well that was kind of easy because I could put a concept around Rattle the Cage. It was very easy to come to. It came through great, so it was an obvious thing like, “OK, let’s Rattle the Cage!” It’s not Shockwave, so that’s how that came about.
This is the first Rods album with Freddy Villano on bass. What does he add to The Rods and how does he compare or contrast to Garry Bordonaro?
DRF: Well, Freddy is a great guy. He’s a great bass player. I can’t say anything negative about him. I never really knew Freddy that much prior. I know that when Garry decided to retire from doing this, it was just after the pandemic. It was tough because Carl and I really had to decide. Do we just call it a day for The Rods? Garry was with us a long time. He was a very integral part of the band. He was a great bass player, a great singer, fantastic onstage. He was a good presence in the band.
That’s not something, with any band, to replace. When you’re replacing an original member of the band, it’s very difficult to replace that because he wasn’t just a bass player. We thought about it. Freddy lives locally. He only lives 10 minutes from where I live, so he’s in the area. Carl said, “Freddy might be interested. He’s great bass player.” So we brought Freddy in. Carl and I wanted to continue on. We wanted to record. Being a writer, I wanted to stay with music.
We brought Freddy into a rehearsal and it was just a perfect fit, and the fact that he’s not over 5 ft, 4″, so he looked really good with us *laughs*. He’s a great bass player, great performer, great guy to be around because being in a band, only part of it is the playing. There’s many, many people that, whether it’s guitar, bass, or drums, are fantastic. Just look on the internet. There are 12 and 13 year olds that are ripping on the guitar, they’re playing bass, drums, so the actual playing is only one part of it. You have to be able to get along with this person that you’re in a band with. You become like a family with these people. Freddy’s that. He’s such a good guy.
Yes, it’s different in some ways than it was with Garry. It was all good with Garry. It’s all good with Freddy, but it’s just slightly different. Freddy’s bass sound is a little bit different than Garry’s. The fact that Freddy is a little bit younger than Carl and I, it kind of gave a new energy to the band. It gave us a new inspiration, having this younger guy in the band. He was really psyched. In fact, Freddy was a fan of the band before he had an opportunity to play bass in the band *laughs*.
He just really gave us a good boost of energy of being in the band. I don’t know if I answered your question or not. I probably overdid it, but it’s really great having Freddy in the band. Of course, we miss Garry, but Freddy’s doing a great job with us. He’s a good guy.
As always, this album is filled with rip roaring guitar riffs. For you, what qualities does a riff need to earn its way onto a Rods album?
DRF: Well, I think first of all, I have to be happy with it. I have to play it and think, “Yeah, I can do something with this.” To me, it sounds good. It might not sound good to the masses. Nobody might like it, but for me to continue on with it and think that it would fit with The Rods, I would have to like it first. In the beginning, it was difficult because playing with Ronnie (James Dio), as somebody that was a co-writer or writer of the songs back in the Elf days, it was really unlimited as a writer. I could write anything because Ronnie could sing anything. There was no limit to what could be done musically.
With The Rods, it was different because with me being the singer and Garry doing a lot of the singing too, we had to come up with music that fit our identity and as to what we could perform. That put a little bit of difference in as far as how the music comes out, but if I’m happy with a riff and I know I can come up with it and I can look at some titles that I’ve got written down and I can put the two together, then I can present it as a Rods song that would represent us well.
Many of the songs on this album contain lyrics about heavy metal and its undeniable power. As someone who’s been involved in this music from its very beginning in the late ’60s and early ’70s, what does heavy metal mean to you and how do you feel about your role in its evolution?
DRF: Back in the early days, I started out on drums in a band. I wasn’t even a guitar player. Ronnie asked me to be a guitar player in his band and that was great for me because I got to learn to play guitar. I never took a lesson. I was self taught. I had people that I idolized of the day, like Jeff Beck, Ritchie Blackmore: All these great guitar players that were my favorites that I got to go, “How do they do that? Let me try it.” because I never took a lesson. Until today, I can’t even play a scale, not one. It’s just not my thing. I’m old school: Tony Iommi, “Let’s play a riff.” type of thing.
It’s just the way that it all started for me and it continued that way. I call myself…maybe I’m a one dimensional type of guitar player because that’s the way I play, but I guess you can say that about a lot of different guitar players that have a style. That’s my style, like it or not, take it or leave it. That’s my style. It’s just like when you would hear Jeff Beck play, you knew it was Jeff Beck. When you heard Sabbath play, you knew it was Tony Iommi. You could tell right off the bat. The same goes for a lot of the notable guitar players. You can tell by just listening to…Billy Gibbons is another one. That’s where I lay as far as the guitar goes for me.
Back to your question, heavy metal is such a broad, broad term now. Back in the day, when we were on tour with Deep Purple, it was hard rock. We were a hard rock band. All of a sudden, when The Rods first came out, it was the “new wave of heavy metal”. We were in it. We didn’t realize we were in it, but we were at the very beginning of it *laughs*. Since then, there’s been so many different types of heavy metal. Black metal, death metal, this metal, that metal. I don’t even know how many types of metal there are!
I look at my band as, are we really a metal band? We’re more like a classic metal band because our songs are put together in a classic way, an old school way where it’s intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, an “everybody singalong” kind of thing. I like a lot of different types of music. I like a lot of different types of metal bands, but I’m not really up on…are there 100 different types of metal bands or genres? Are there 50? I don’t know all of them, but anybody that’s creative or innovative that’s trying to come up with something new, I’m cool with that. I’m good with that. It’s all good.
In your defense, with the rise of social media and the internet, it feels like there’s a new metal subgenre every week. I’ll get an email along the lines of, “Check out this blackened technical deathgrind band.” I’m like, “What?!” It’s incredible that, going on nearly 55 years now, what started with the Sabbaths and the Purples and the Elfs has since turned into this never-ending web of music.
DRF: It really is. I give everybody credit for whatever they wanna do. Whatever makes them feel good, that’s what they should play. If you feel good playing that genre of music, I’m not criticizing it. I’m not criticizing any type of music. I never really could understand a lot about rap music, but obviously there’s millions and millions of people that do. It’s just that I didn’t understand it. It was hard for me to understand it for a long time, but I give everybody credit that’s trying to come up with something new because that’s what it’s all about.
Going back to Ronnie, having cut your teeth together in Elf and subsequently collaborating up until his passing, what is the greatest lesson you learned from him?
DRF: There’s so many things that I learned from him. It’s very difficult to pick one. I think Ronnie’s perseverance was one thing that was really obvious. He persevered. If you saw the documentary (Dio: Dreamers Never Die), it tells a lot about his perseverance. He had already put in 20 years of banging around the country in a van with us before anybody even heard of him in Rainbow or Elf! Perseverance, his determination, his attitude on life: He had a great attitude on life.
He was a very, very funny character. For those people that don’t really see that side of Ronnie being a fan, but he was a very funny person. It was constant laughing when we were together and backstage and the whole part of life that’s not onstage, the everyday life that everybody has to live. He was a very comical person, always finding the funny things about it. I think at times I’m trapped into that type of lifestyle because that’s what I grew up with.
There’s people that I get associated with in today’s world that don’t understand that, so sometimes it’s hard for me in a social situation where I take things a little bit differently or humorously than other people, only because I’m remembering what the humor was back then in the day. He was a brilliant person. He just was so smart and so creative. I could talk for hours about him and experiences with him. It was just a huge inspiration for me to spend even the amount of time that I was able to with him, aside from the band, being part of the family and all that. He was a very big inspiration for me.
By the way, that documentary was fantastic. Easily one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen.
DRF: The production crew on that did an incredible job of getting everything accurate from beginning to end. The thing is over two hours long, but it seems like it goes by in a second. They did a great job on his life and capturing pretty much everything and the way it went for him. Obviously, the saddest thing is there would’ve been a lot more music and there would’ve been a lot more from him if he was able to live longer. You can say the same thing about Hendrix or Joplin or anybody that died in an untimely manner. It was a great experience.
One release of yours that has always intrigued me is the 1978 single, “Midnight Lady”, which features Joey DeMaio of Manowar fame on bass. What events took place that led to Dave Feinstein’s Thunder, as you were branded, to morph into The Rods?
DRF: *laughs* Wow! There was a lot going on back then. Joey only lives a short distance from me too, so we’re local people. I’ve always been a great friend of Joey’s. I still am! I haven’t seen him in a while, but we’re really good friends. At the time, we were searching for a band to play in, so I got together with Joey and Thunder. That was a great experience because Joey is an incredibly talented person and bass player. I think at the time, everybody was thrown into this pot and it was being mixed up and pushed up together with who happened to end up where and do what. I don’t know. It was kind of a weird time. I always and still do respect Joey’s outlook on music and his determination too. Here’s another guy who was determined and I really, really look up to him for that determination.
How it happened to end up as The Rods with Carl and I? I don’t know. I was out of music for a while. When I left Elf, I didn’t want anything to do with music for a couple years because I just got burnt out on the business part of it. Before The Rods were even formed, I took the radio out of my truck. I didn’t even listen to music for a while. I always followed Ronnie’s career as he went through Rainbow and Sabbath and everything. Of course, at that point, he had moved to L.A. and I was still in New York, so it was a long distance thing.
Eventually, being a musician is something that I don’t think ever leaves you. It’s always there and it will emerge at some point in time. It started to come back for me and I said, “I gotta get out. I gotta play. I gotta write a song. I gotta form a band.” Originally, to form The Rods was, for me, to form a band that could go play bars and make $50 a night so I could buy gas for my truck and some food. That was the original thought of forming the band The Rods.
I knew this kid Dennis who was a friend. I said, “I gotta find a drummer.” He said, “Let’s go to this bar that’s not too far away. I know this guy named Carl. I think he’s a really pretty good drummer. We should go hear him.” So we went to this bar that night and Carl was playing in this band. After he got done, Carl and I talked. I said, “Hey, wanna form a band?” He said, “Yeah, we’ll form a band!” That’s how The Rods pretty much started. We started writing songs. Carl’s a songwriter also.
We looked around for a bass player. Our original bass player was a local guy (Stephen Starmer). He left the band after a short stint. Then we had another bass player. Garry was actually our third bass player. It all happened at a very quick time. Garry was the one that stuck with us. The Rods were formed as a band to go play bars and make a few bucks and that was it. All of a sudden, we started writing songs. We started recording them. We got a record deal. *laughs* We’re on tour with Iron Maiden in the UK and we’re signed with a record label.
Everything just fell into place. It wasn’t even like…I think a lot of times you form a band. “Oh we wanna be rockstars and we wanna make records and we wanna do this and that.” It wasn’t that way. We formed that band to go play some bars and make a few bucks and all of a sudden it just happened. I think we were fortunate that it happened. It almost happened without trying, but the music business is two words. It’s “music” and “business”.
Unfortunately, the musicians get taken advantage of a lot of times by the business part of the music business. That’s what happened to The Rods. That’s why after a lot of great success early on, we just decided we can’t do this anymore. It was basically because of the business part of it. That was the first bit of The Rods. We didn’t break up or split up or have any kind of negative feelings towards each other. We just said, “We can’t do this anymore for a while.”
Anyways, I’m rambling on now and I don’t even know what the question was originally *laughs*. You’ll find when talking to me, when we have lots of time, I can talk for a long time because there’s a lot for me to talk about, especially to somebody that wants to hear it! I sometimes get criticized that I ramble on too much, but if I know somebody’s interested, I want to tell those stories.
I appreciate it because that answer is actually the perfect segue into the next question. There was a 20+ year period in which The Rods were completely inactive. During these dark ages for true metal, throughout the ’90s and ’00s, did you ever envision a landscape in which The Rods would be able to return? Furthermore, in what ways has The Rods’ 21st century rebirth surprised you?
DRF: What happened was, like I said, at that point in time, I didn’t listen to music for a while. I just didn’t want to. All of a sudden, I came back. I started to write songs and I started to record them locally. I started to do solo albums. I never had a record deal with any label that was big. If I did, it was a very small label, a regional release or whatever. I hadn’t seen Carl or Garry in a number of years. I got a phone call from Carl and he said, “I just heard your latest solo record. It really makes me feel like I want to play again.” I said, “Well geez. Maybe we can have a reunion! Let’s do a couple of reunion gigs. Let me call Garry and see if he’s up for doing it.”
Garry was up for doing it and we played one bar in my hometown. Then we played another bar where Garry lives in Ithaca. That’s only a 20 minute ride from here. We played these bars. At that point, there was the internet. When The Rods stopped before, there was no internet, so we had no idea. We do these two shows in these little bars and people were coming out of the woodwork with old albums for us to sign and stuff like that. We said, “Wow, this is great! We never even realized that we had people that still remembered us. Let’s keep doing this!”
At that point, we never got another manager. We never got a booking agent. We’d just book a job here, book a job there. Because of the internet, people were contacting us. We made Carl the representative to take all the information and spread it to us because somebody from the UK or Germany or Brazil would say, “Hey, what do we gotta give you to come play our festival?” It’s like, “Well, we gotta have airline tickets. We gotta have a place to sleep, food and transportation. Add that up and we’ll come and play it.” So we started doing that. Up until the pandemic, we were doing 6 or 8 shows a year.
Actually, in 2011 we did 30 days with Dio Disciples after Ronnie passed away in Europe. We would do 6 or 8 shows, mostly festivals, or people would contact us directly and say, “What do you gotta have to come?” We were just going for break even. It wasn’t that we made any money. Every once in a while we made a few bucks because of merchandise, but we were going to countries that we had never been to before back in the day. We never even realized we had fans in these countries! It was great and all because of the internet. We got to go to Brazil. We were in Norway. Some of these countries that we never dreamed that we would be going to, even during the day when we were doing it full time, so it’s been really great.
Of course, then the pandemic hit and everything came to a standstill for a few years. Now, we’re on the second album since the whole thing. Rattle the Cage is the newest, but as far as going out and playing in ’24, we wanna do it and we probably will. The only thing that’s solid right now is we’re going to Australia in March for 4 shows. That will be great. Whoever thought anyone in Australia ever heard of The Rods *laughs*? I guess they must’ve! We’ll find out when we get there! That’s basically how it came together.
That’ll be great! Isn’t that a package with Anvil and Ross the Boss?
DRF: Yeah, and what’s really great about it is we know those guys. We’re friends with those guys. They were from way back when too. One of the good things is gonna be because we know them. To be with them is gonna be cool. (Anvil drummer) Robb (Reiner) and Carl are pretty close, the two drummers. Robb’s always saying to Carl, “Hey, you guys gotta come on tour with us!” We don’t do it full time anymore.
They’re in a different position than us. They’re doing it full time. They’ll go on the road for two or three months at a time everywhere. We’re not doing that. I said, “We would love to play with you, but it’s gotta be just a spot. We’ll come out for a week and we’ll do some spot shows. Fly here or fly there or wherever it is.” We can’t hit the road for months at a time, so this is really gonna be good because it’s gonna be with them. It’ll be very cool I’m sure. We’re looking forward to it.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of The Rods’ classic album, Let Them Eat Metal. What memories stand out to you from the making of that album and what are your favorite songs off of it?
DRF: I can’t even remember what songs are on there. The song “Let Them Eat Metal” is a pretty popular song. We get requests for that quite a bit. For a long time, we never really did it in the live set. For what reason, I don’t know why. It’s hard when you record a lot of songs and songs that you think, “Well, these songs are eh.” They’re not that great, but they’re the last songs on the album to fill it in and make the number of songs that we need *laughs*, but they really suck, so we’re never gonna play them live.
Then you get to the job and some guy goes, “Hey, are you guys gonna play this song?” And it happens to be one of those songs. It’s like, “Oh my God! There’s somebody that really likes that song? We thought that was the worst song we ever did and a song that we would never think of playing live, but somebody likes it!” I don’t know. I got off the point, but…I’m trying to remember what songs are on that album. For me, when we would record an album, it was like, it’s done, it’s out. I’d put it away. I don’t listen to it anymore. I move onto what’s next.
For me, to think back, there’s never really been a “favorite” Rods album for me. I can say the very first Rods album (1980’s Rock Hard) was special because, and still today, some of my favorite songs are on that album. That was only because we did that on our own. We lugged two inch tape in and out of hotels. We recorded on weekends for free at a college facility that a friend of ours was doing it in as a project. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into that album. Some of the good songs that people wanna hear from that album, “Crank It Up”, “Power Lover”, that kind of thing, were on that album.
Let Them Eat Metal was a good album too at the time, because of the cover and everything. The girl on the cover, she was a friend of mine. I went to school with her *laughs*. I knew her quite well. We had her model. She was the prettiest girl in school. She was an awesome person. I knew her whole family. She was really great. We needed to have an album cover that really said something. She was more than happy to do it.
I think that album cover made it on national TV on one of the talk shows at night saying how terrible this music is for our younger generation, to see an album cover like that. It was like, “Wow!” Just turn on HBO or Showtime nowadays and you’ll see 100 times worse than that. That album spurred a lot of controversy and some criticism from those types of people, but any kind of news, negative or positive, is always good because it’s mentioning your name *laughs*. We did get some publicity out there, but that was a monumental album.
In closing, there were rumors a couple years ago that this current Rods album, Rattle the Cage, could be the band’s last; rumors that were dispelled by Carl. With new music in the works, I imagine you can say the same? Furthermore, does retirement ever cross your mind?
DRF: We’re definitely gonna do another album, only because I wanna hear my songs recorded *laughs*. I think there’s some really good…before Rattle the Cage was out, I had three other songs that we could’ve put on Rattle the Cage. We hadn’t finished them yet, so I decided we’re gonna hold them back. Now, since then, there’s six songs. There are some songs to me that have a lot of meaning.
Even on Rattle the Cage, there’s some good rockers, but songs like “Cry Out Loud” and “Now and Forever”, a lot of times I get a bit political in my writing. I’m talking about the world and the people and what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. I don’t really wanna be a preacher like that. I only wanna, sometimes in my songs, express how I feel and what I feel that we should do. There’s a couple of new songs in those six songs that have that type of thing in there, so to answer the question about the rumor, there’s more than a 99% chance that there will be another Rods album.
The new Rods album, Rattle the Cage, is available now on Massacre Records. For more information on The Rods, visit www.therods.com.