After a rough day of middle school, nothing, and I mean NOTHING, beat coming home to a bowl of Doritos chips, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater loaded up into the PS2, and the sound of CKY blasting through my TV. Of course, much has changed since these simpler times. I’m no longer an angry 11 year old and founding guitarist/singer Deron Miller is no longer in CKY. What hasn’t changed is my love of loud, raucous music. Nor has Miller’s penchant for creating such, albeit now with a new outfit, the aptly named 96 Bitter Beings. I sat down with Miller to discuss the band’s upcoming new album, Synergy Restored, his influences, the band’s return to the stage, and the importance of rock n’ roll.
Greetings Deron and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Deron Miller: It’s a lovely evening over here in Los Angeles. I’m doing very well. How are you doing?
I’m doing fantastic, coming to you live here from Chicago, the Windy City. I’m sure you’ve played here many, many times.
DM: I love Chicago! I love that show Shameless. That’s the kind of city I want to eventually end up living in.
It’s funny because the neighborhood where the show is based and the Gallagher house itself is maybe 10 minutes away from where I am right now.
DM: Oh man, you gotta send me some pictures of you in front of the house!
Will do man! We’re about a month away from the release of 96 Bitter Beings’ long awaited sophomore album, Synergy Restored. What did the band set out to achieve with this album as opposed to the debut, Camp Pain?
DM: Well both albums were recorded around the same time. Camp Pain, we got it ready around 2018 and released it independently through our campaign fundraiser that a lot of the fans got involved in and helped support the financial aspect of making these two records. The fans got the digital copies and then it leaked, which I was hoping it wouldn’t, so I had to put it out on Spotify and all of the streaming sites. It’s cool. It all worked out.
After Camp Pain came out…it’s a play on words. A campaign was used to fund it and it’s titled Camp Pain. The word “camp” always ends up in my music somehow. You can understand why. But after we put out Camp Pain in 2018, that gave us a lot more time to refine Synergy. Camp Pain is a sampler of all the things that made, to me, all our music interesting in the past. There’s a cover song. It starts with a heavy track. There’s an instrumental. There’s a song written by a friend of mine. Our guitar player wrote some music and I wrote lyrics. There’s a ballad at the end. It’s a really good example of all the different styles I’ve utilized in the past, and I wanted to pick the best songs for that record.
Synergy is more focused. It’s more grounded in a similar poppy, dark, metal, rock kind of theme. I know people are afraid of the word “pop”, but it’s a different kind of pop. It’s like a Master of Puppets kind of pop I would say, but there’s a little bit of Top 40 sound in there. I don’t know if you’ve heard the record or not.
Yes, I have.
DM: OK, good. I would love to hear your opinion and how you describe it.
That’s a perfect segue into the next question, because I hear this album and I’m greeted by those chunky, familiar riffs. I think to myself, “This is something Deron Miller would do.” But what is that? A lot of your music, both with CKY and 96 Bitter Beings, is hard to pin down stylistically. Its been labeled hard rock, metal, alternative, and even stoner. Do you think this musical ambiguity has worked to your advantage?
DM: Stoner’s probably the closest, but we’ve also gotten skate punk, nu metal, and grunge, which was my least favorite. They try to pinpoint it and they can’t. Back in the day when we had Rolling Stone magazine and stuff like that, these music critics would try to pinpoint a label. I don’t think you can. I don’t set out to make it that way. I just think that it’s something that, over the years, through all the influences that I’ve had, I’ve created this Frankenstein kind of sound that people tell me about.
I’m not aware of it. My music sounds simple to me, but I’ve been made aware that I have my own sound. I can’t break that mold even if I wanted to. That’s just what comes out. Even when I try to do a death metal record, people were still saying, “You can tell it’s Deron Miller.” That’s a really cool status to have. I’m very lucky to have that, something that people notice right away. I guess the bottom line is I’m really fucking proud of this album.
Rightfully so, if only because enough people will hear this and recognize it from the get-go.
DM: My belief all along is word of mouth is the best promotion. You can’t buy it. There isn’t enough money you can pay for ads to make somebody like something. That’s helped me throughout my career. Even when we were part of the whole Jackass thing and there was a lot of Jackass music, we were labelled “the Jackass band” because I think our music was the best and we stuck out. Word of mouth sold those records really well. So this “musical ambiguity” is something that people remind me of and I’m really, really lucky and thankful to have it. I’m actually blessed, really blessed to have it. It’s something that I will always have because it’s not something I’m ever gonna stop doing.
Word of mouth is great. Having my own thing is very, very beneficial, but sometimes it can be a roadblock, which I don’t mind, because people will hear it and not give it a chance because of things like Jackass and things that aren’t serious. But that whole thing happened organically. We didn’t call up MTV and say, “Yo, can we have our music in Jackass?” We started that whole thing with our CKY videos where we wanted to do something revolutionary, get all our friends who hung out in the lobby of the high school who didn’t fit in. We would be the band and they would do stunts. We’d video tape it and we would be the soundtrack. That was the idea.
It was very quick, maybe about 6 months to a year, where MTV sniffed it out and combined east coast and west coast and made it what Jackass is. In no way were we riding coattails because at that point, we already had our entire album and all of that stuff. It’s a double edged sword, but you know what? Nothing makes me prouder than somebody saying, “As soon as I started playing that song, I knew it was you.” That’s much better than 99% of bands that just have one influence. My influences go from ABBA to Frank Zappa. A lot of bands and musical artists are afraid to show that. Somehow, I’ve been able to combine all the best attributes of those artists and the inspiration of all that music together into one thing and guess call it my own. I have permission to do so *laughs*.
Who currently plays with you in 96 Bitter Beings and how does this unit compare or contrast to other bands and projects you’ve been involved in?
DM: Well after I left CKY, I took a break and did an acoustic solo album where I covered a bunch of old songs and new songs and all that. Before that, I did a death metal project. I took a break because we were filling the house with kids. Then I started getting itchy. Of course I knew I would go back to it, but I wanted to start a band that pretty much continued where I left off, so I got a bunch of band members together. I made sure that they were talented. They’re very, very talented. My guitar player Ken (Hunter) is an amazing studio guy. He mixed, mastered, engineered, and recorded everything that we do. He’s really easy to work with, which is refreshing.
I just wanted to grab people who were hungry and passionate and wanted to go for it, I guess is the best way to say it. The fact that we already have 2 tours under our belt, even though after COVID there was a long time we couldn’t tour. We had a European tour cancelled, which is a real bummer, but we’re in the middle of setting something up to come to Europe and do a second leg in North America. I love touring with this band. I never particularly liked touring, but I love touring with this band because it’s really easygoing. It’s not stressful. I would always, say, “Why do I not like touring so much?” It’s because it’s hard to get along with 8 people in a bus. You’ll have road crew, an opening band, and my band, all those people.
Right now, we’re going around in a van, starting at the bottom rung of the ladder. It’s not hard. It’s very easy. It’s very professional. Everybody respects each other’s obscure personality. People put up with me, which is rare *laughs*. If you don’t know me, you’re not gonna like me. It takes some time for people to get to know me, and I’m cool with that. I just go with it. I go with the flow and it’s much easier and I don’t feel like I’m leaving 6 year old kids. I’m not missing out on birthdays and stuff like that. My kids are almost adults. They’re teenagers. I can go out and go back to doing what I’m known for doing. If I’m honest with myself, I feel like I’m doing it better than I have, so I’m going with it.
That’s interesting to hear because you’ve played some big stages. You’ve done the euro fests and opened for Guns N’ Roses, or should I say the Axl Rose Band.
DM: Yeah.
Is it more…I don’t want to use the word “humbling”. Do you find it more organic and honest to be playing the clubs and taking the hands-on approach with the fans?
DM: I always look into…I don’t know what you’d call it. I manifest things like I did back then where, when I was playing clubs and we were playing clubs in Philly on South Street like the Cadillac Grill and Nick’s Roast Beef and all that stuff, I’d say, “You know, eventually we’re gonna be playing arenas. I’m gonna get to play with Metallica.” Whether or not I truly believed it didn’t matter. I wanted it so bad, whether I was thinking about it or not. Basically, I’m just doing the same thing, only this time I don’t have to completely start over with no support. I have a lot of support from fans from the past and press from the past such as yourself. Millers, past and present *laughs*.
Even though it’s a much difficult time for rock n’ roll and metal to navigate, I still wanna be involved in its resurgence, whether I’m the one that does it or whether I have a little bit of help getting it back to the mainstream and getting pop crap kicked off of TikTok and all that stuff. The first sign of hope was when Netflix licensed “96 Quite Bitter Beings” a couple months ago. That gave me hope. That was a sign. So I’m just going with the flow. I’m really happy with the way that I’m doing what I’ve always done. I don’t have any insecurities. I don’t have any regrets like “Oh shit, I should’ve gone back and done that.” Never.
It’s funny because with Synergy, from 2016 to 2022, we were still working on it. I was working on it up until a week before we handed it in. One of the things, eventually this will be really funny when enough people hear it, is in “Vaudeville’s Revenge”, the original lyric was “unsensitive to what used to be sublime”. I realized “unsensitive” wasn’t a word, although I thought it was. I thought it might mean not having any feeling physically, but it doesn’t. It’s not a word. I had to go back and change it to “insensitive”, so I was working on the album *laughs* a week before we handed it in, fixing little things here and there with the mixes.
We were totally obsessed, but we loved the album, so we never got tired of it. We handed it in and I’ve never been so excited for an album release in my life. Even though it’s not particularly a “good time” for this kind of music, it doesn’t matter. I get to do what I want to do with a bunch of new bandmembers and a bunch of new great friends. I get to travel and have a good time without having to worry about all the shit that happened when this kind of music was big. I love your shirt by the way *points to Raven shirt*.
Thanks man! I’m going to see them tonight.
DM: Really?
Yeah, they’re playing Reggies tonight over on 21st and State.
DM: That’s the thing. You can’t stop us! We’re all gonna die onstage. I’m telling you, we’re all gonna die onstage. There’s no better place to go. I’ll collapse when I’m 85 trying to play “Rio Bravo” or something and they’ll take me off the stage and cremate me and somebody else can take my spot *laughs*.
You’re right. When it comes to this music, we’re in it for life. One thing I love about this album, besides the music itself, is how in the press release, it’s described as “proper rock n’ roll made by an actual band, rather than a punch of over processed samples and otherwise stale shenanigans”. Do you find it troubling the increasing amount of so called rock and metal bands relying on tracks, auto tune, and other technological trickery?
DM: Oh yeah. Well I wanna make it clear that Pro Tools is a great thing if you use it not as a tool to change what’s not good about your performances. The fact that there’s an unlimited amount of tracks is what makes me so happy. I can go in and, I’ve always done this, since the beginning. I do at least 8 to 10 vocal tracks on every song of different octaves. I do low, middle, high, and then I do my whispers and growls. And then it gets mixed. Usually the lead vocals get, of course, pushed up to lead. Everything else is underneath.
There is one word on the album that has auto tune on it and it’ll be interesting to see if anyone can hear it, but I doubt it because it doesn’t sound like auto tune was used. But to use something like auto tune or use something to correct problems with the recordings of the songs or the album at all is embarrassing. It’s shameful, even if nobody knew about it. If Ken had to go through Pro Tools and fix one of my guitar tracks or something, I’d be like, “You know what? Let’s fucking do it again. You don’t need to fix it.”
So we don’t use it in that sense. We use it in the sense that 2 inch tape is obsolete. It’s way too expensive to find these vintage studios that are gonna allow us with our budget to go in and record on 2 inch tape. Pro Tools has its faults, especially when metal bands get in there and they do a very minimal amount of work, and then they say, “OK engineer or producer. Put it all together.” Sometimes the guitar players play one riff once and they just loop it. That’s really, really artificial. It’s not that I can’t listen to something that’s done that way, but personally for me, I couldn’t do it that way. I wouldn’t encourage our band to do it that way. I treat it as 2 inch tape, but instead of splicing or punching in on tape, we punch in on Pro Tools.
Sure, and it shows on the album. It’s a pure, straightforward hard rock album with great hooks and great riffs. You’re right though about, maybe not the bands I listen to, but the ones who constitute rock radio these days. You’ll hear the song and think to yourself, “Wow, this guitarist literally played the riff once and looped it.” Or the chorus is copy and paste. It’s disappointing for me as a listener.
DM: Yeah, the thing is, when I do 8 to 10 vocal tracks for a song, I always double each track. So I’m also doing the choruses for the second chorus. I just take care of all of those. Sometimes there’s 11 or 12 vocal tracks. I’m addicted to vocal tracks. I always wanna add something. I push myself to go as *sings* high as I can. I go up there, but rarely are they used. If they are used, they’re very low, so it makes for a unique vocal sound, but it’s one vocal sound with 10 to 15 vocal tracks.
In those cases, we maybe will take the first chorus and push it over to the second, but it will be mixed differently and it’s not just 2 vocals. It’s the vocals we didn’t use on the first one. In that aspect, I can see the convenience because I spend so much time on one chorus that it doesn’t make sense to go and redo everything. But when you’re a band and your vocalist might do 1 vocal track or 2 vocal tracks and you fly that, that’s just lazy. It’s weird because I’m even catching old school death metal bands, because I can hear it, flying with one vocal track.
“Flying”, to anybody that doesn’t know, is when you take a take from one part of a song, the song repeats, and you take that performance and put it in the same performance that happens next. I was just shocked because it reminds me of Lars (Ulrich) when he was doing St. Anger. He just played a beat and said, “Alright, see you later.” I guess it works for casual listeners, but for people like us that know that process and can hear it, it’s…I wouldn’t say a letdown. It just seems lazy.
But you know what? Daft Punk has a song called “Around the World” and I love that song. It’s nothing but loops. The only thing that matters in the end is it a good song or is it a boring song, a bad song, a generic song. I love what I consider to be good songs. That song by Daft Punk, to me, is a good song. There are good songs in all genres of music. Even watching Shameless, I’ve heard some rap and country and all different kinds of songs. I’m looking up the Shameless soundtrack and trying to figure out which songs I like.
There’s good songs in all different kinds of music from all different eras and different decades. That’s all that’s important because the technical side of things is a rare interest to people outside of us, musicians and stuff like that. So yeah, I don’t want to go that route, but for me, the very last thing that I think of is, “We’re done with the song. Is it good? Yeah! Is it great? Yeah! Is it fucking amazing? Fuck yeah!” Then we’re done.
Speaking of fucking amazing songs, I want to talk a bit about the album’s lead single, “Vaudeville’s Revenge”. What was the inspiration behind this song and how did it come about?
DM: Vaudeville is something that…my dad loved comedies from the 50s and 60s, black and white stuff like I Love Lucy and My Three Sons and all that stuff. They would always talk about Vaudeville on those shows. I’d be like, “What is Vaudeville?” This was when I was really young. Since then, I’ve gotten to know a little bit about what Vaudeville was. Basically, Vaudeville was touring for sword swallowers, fire breathers, magicians, jugglers, dancers, comedians, and all that stuff. And it was ruined by TV.
It’s similar to the situation that we’re in right now where, guitar players, vocalists, bassists, record stores…Blockbuster Video. All of those great things that defined our childhood, that are gone, I turned it into this fictitious story about how all the people that were involved in putting on a Vaudeville show are returning from the dead to kill digital corporate pieces of shit. Now we didn’t have the budget to make that really, really, really clear in the music video, but we came close enough. That’s basically what the song is about. It follows in the same vein as “Escape From Hellview” and “96 Quite Bitter Beings” where it’s always…people that are smarter or more talented are fighting idiots and almost losing and then finally winning. That seems to be the subject of a lot of my songs, especially the opening tracks. I don’t know why *laughs*.
That’s an interesting point, because while I’m not that old, I am old enough to remember the Blockbuster down the block from my house.
DM: Yeah! I’m sure you’re smart enough to have looked into your past or your family’s past or you’ve taken interest on your own to look into the past to see what entertainment was like just by Googling, “What was going on in 1900? What was going on in 1920?” I wasn’t alive for when radio was the only thing, but I looked it up and I educated myself. People started out with books and then radio and then TV came along and there were live shows. TV and radio were going at the same time.
Then I think people who were involved in these Vaudeville shows, and I’ll admit, I have no idea why it’s called Vaudeville. I thought Vaudeville was a city, but it’s not. It’s a kind of show. I didn’t know that, but I always heard it mentioned. I basically wanted to pay homage to that really unique kind of showbusiness. It’s kind of like the circus. I would have to research it, but I’m sure the circus is not as big as it used to be. Vaudeville was kind of the circus, but without animals. It was just people. The circus is kind of…if you ask a 19 year old kid, “What’s the circus?”, who knows what the fuck they’re gonna say?
I was 23 when I was finding out about…we’ve all seen moves like A Christmas Story where they gathered around the radio to listen to Little Orphan Annie. Where was the TV? It wasn’t around yet. My grandparents used to tell me stories about this stuff, how great it was before TV. I didn’t believe them and I still don’t, but I do believe that the ideas that our media outlets considered to be old and out of date are actually really good ideas for what’s coming.
Basically, what I’m saying is when I was a kid, old ideas were not new ideas. They were done. They were in the past. You can’t bring back the radio if there’s a television. You can’t bring back the VCR when there’s a DVD. Or 8 track and compact disc. I understand that. Now I am a VHA connoisseur. I like to watch VHS cassettes just to get that grainy, shady quality. You know what I’m talking about. That feeling of how it was when I was a kid. But if I show one of my kids a VHS tape, they’re like, “What’s wrong with it?”
VHS tape is not as good as a DVD. That’s totally obvious. But what’s going on now with music is almost like it’s the obsolete idea. What people are missing out on is a new idea. I don’t think there’s enough anger in music. There’s not enough edge in music, unless it’s underground. Heavy music used to be mainstream. Metallica’s black album is the biggest selling album of all time. Right now, we have no music with any edge. There’s a lot of kids out there, boys and girls, that are aggravated and they don’t know how to release this anger.
You’re not gonna find it through Beyoncé or Lil Nas X or any of that shit, but that’s all they know because nowadays, with their short attention spans, teenagers are consumed immediately with what’s there and what’s been put in front of them. And then that goes away. I believe, and I’m gonna do my best to either be the king of it happening, or being .0005% of it happening, but I want to bring the kind of music that me and you love, us Millers, we gotta stick together, the music that we love, and bring it back to the mainstream.
That way, instead of bullying and vandalizing and shooting up schools, these kids will get their anger out through listening to the music that we know and love, that are almost your age! Which I’m very impressed, because you’re almost the youngest person I’ve talked to about metal. Definitely, without a doubt, the only kid in his 20s wearing a Raven shirt, this year. No one else is wearing a Raven shirt *laughs*. And that’s something that you should be proud of because you’ve obviously found what I’m trying to make happen.
Totally. The funny thing about my age group, I’ll say 22 through 25, is when I think of the kids even 5 years younger than me, I feel old. I can’t relate to that. But I do remember growing up and the first time I’ve heard CKY. I’m sure you’ve heard it from a lot of people my age, but it was from Tony Hawk and it was from Jackass. And for us, sure we loved AC/DC and KISS and Mercyful Fate and so on, but for us, CKY was one of a few that was like “our band”. We could directly link them to “our” era and what was happening in the now.
DM: That was really interesting because when we were told we were gonna be on that videogame, I was like, “OK, whatever.” Even though Tony Hawk gave us so many opportunities, like when he was doing the Boom Boom Huck Jam thing years ago and we played a couple shows on this hovering stage in front of this arena audience, it was so cool. I found that to be more important than being on a videogame. I’m not a videogame guy. I love certain videogames, but they’re never the ones everyone else likes. I’m still playing the Friday the 13th games, once a week.
My son, he’s on the computer. I don’t know how he fucking does it. He’s on the computer pressing letters and killing people. I don’t understand it. All I hear is *click click* “Oh fuck!” *click click* “Oh shit!” I don’t understand that. I get it! I’m not like, “What is this shit you kids are doing these days?” I understand it, but I didn’t understand the value of being put in that videogame at that time. I couldn’t have, because now that it’s like 20, 25 years later, the nostalgia of the music that we did back then is almost making it bigger than it was when it was out.
That gives most bands a second life. Not all of them. Probably not Raven, to be honest. Raven was an 80s band, but the likelihood that they’ll come back for a second, nostalgic venture is very slim. That goes for most of the bands I love, but if you look at a band like Anvil, that’s similar to Raven, they got that second chapter through that documentary. That was very original and unique. Ever since I saw that documentary, it was like, “Wow, this kind of music needs to come back.” It’s proved to be commercial. History repeats itself. We just need somebody to give it a push and blow away all this crap that’s twerking and…crap. It’s fine for a certain group of people, but we need variety.
We’re talking about YouTube…one day I wanted to see how many views “Vaudeville’s Revenge” had gotten that day. Then I see an ad for some pop artist that I would never listen to in a million years. I thought, “God, wouldn’t it be great if the video for Vaudeville’s Revenge was an ad before this shitty video?” That’s what I’m looking for and hoping for because history repeats itself. Everything swings around. Old ideas become new ideas. That’s where I’m at right now in my life. Stranger things have happened in my life, but also in the world.
It’s time for rock and metal to come back and save a lot of kids from doing horrible things because they don’t have an outlet for that angst. The anxiety, the rage, you can’t even mosh anymore. Most clubs and venues won’t let you mosh. They won’t let you stagedive. I love that. I love getting my teeth chipped from a stage diver that slammed the microphone in my face. It’s this release of rage that can send a kid back to school on Monday morning where he’s “here”, ready to do his work. There’s nothing like that.
Movies have gotten gorier and more violent, but you don’t connect to movies like you do music, heavy music. That sucks because they’re very similar, but it’s funny that you’ll never hear a death metal song in a horror movie. It’s very rare. Usually it’s some generic nu metal song. That stuff is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about real old school Metallica and Megadeth. Even Blue Öyster Cult had dark things going on. Of course there’s Slayer. Kids are starting to find out about Slayer, but only that they should wear the T shirt. Nirvana…I can’t tell you how many Nirvana shirts I’ve seen teenagers wear and they think it’s a brand, not a band. That’s gotta change! People need to be aware of this thing that’s never been a part of their lives, that can possibly save their lives.
You’re 100% right, especially about all that youthful rage. Growing up, some of my fondest memories were going to shows in junior high and high school and going nuts. You know, things like going to see D.R.I. and getting kicked in the head and showing up to school the next morning. That was my life.
DM: And you didn’t want to beat anyone up the next morning because you had gotten your fill at the D.R.I. show. It’s like adding salt to the wound, or insult to injury. Not only do we have a shortage of promotion for rock and metal music, but if you do find out about it, don’t stagedive. Don’t mosh. Everybody’s afraid of getting sued. All I remember is at the very first show that I played at a bar in Westchester, Pennsylvania, everyone in the audience were my friends. And they were moshing and hitting each other.
From seeing that and listening to bands like Exodus, the way they say it’s “good, friendly violent fun” in “The Toxic Waltz”. It’s violence, but playful. It’s just a release of this energy where maybe your sibling pissed you off or your parents pissed you off or your teachers or whatever. You got bullied for whatever reason. You have long hair or you’re overweight or whatever reason somebody bullies you. They don’t understand your culture…all this stupid shit that kids are still allowed to initiate and say. In high school and middle school, they’re still allowed to say, “What the fuck is that? What are you doing?” But there’s no way for the bullied to come back and fight.
Instead of getting themselves in trouble by doing fucked up things to respond to that kind of hatred, they should be finding other outlets. Whether it’s being creative and doing art that expresses themselves, but I always, always recommend hard rock and heavy metal. If you understand it and you stick with it, you might not understand it at first, but once you do get it going and if you pay attention, you’re gonna be invited into this family. I call it a family because it is. Metalheads and rock guys, people that understand good rock and heavy music, it’s all rock n’ roll. There’s a brotherhood there. The guys in the Marines call it a brotherhood, even though they don’t know each other.
It’s a very, very unique thing to be part of this family that’s all about music in a heavy sense, just the quality of how good music can be of all different kinds. If you can listen to ABBA and end up loving Cannibal Corpse, you’re onto something. It does something to you where it does relieve the stress and the anxiety. For me, I’m very stressed out. I’m very anxious and very angry. Then I go onstage and have the best 2 hours of my life and I’m good.
And of course, you can’t have that great rock n’ roll without equally great riffs. You’ve written many throughout your career, and this latest album is full of them. For you, what makes a killer riff?
DM: That’s difficult. I scrap so much stuff. I have my old 4 track machine in front of me right now. It takes cassette tapes. That’s because I refuse to learn the technology of recording. The reason I refuse to learn to engineer or produce or mix or anything is because I know if I had all that stuff available in front of me, I’d never get anything done because I’d be spending too much time on it. I still like to pretend that I’m on the clock, that time is money, that somebody is rushing me. Even with that, I create under pressure.
I don’t know. It’s so hard because playing guitar since 1985, and loving playing guitar, you tend to understand a certain figure or a certain pattern with your fingers is gonna sound a certain way. You have to really come up with something unique. Thank God I have 4 tracks, because I might come up with something that’s not so unique, but when I do a second track or something over it, then it becomes something unique. It’s so rare, but the amount of time I spend on doing it, I come up with enough material for a record.
Usually the best riffs come in the studio, out of nowhere, when there’s a drumbeat recorded and I just come in with something. That’s been an easier process, but I do scrap a lot of stuff and I get very frustrated. I have to do everything I can to not want to fucking break my vintage 4 track *laughs*. But you know what? It always works out. After every record I’ve ever done, I’m like, “How am I gonna top this?” I know I can top it. It just happens. I can’t explain it. It’s just given to me.
I’ve read that you only play the first four strings of your guitar because you find the last two to be “irritating”. How come?
DM: Because they’re not wound. To anybody who’s not a guitar player, a wound string is a guitar string that’s given a little extra girth with the way it’s wound. It’s wound with an additional piece of metal. The last couple strings that are just strings, they’re like razor wire. They cut up your fingers which I don’t care. I have the callouses. They don’t bother me, but it’s almost impossible to perfectly intonate them. I did away with them a long time ago because I realized that none of the songs that we were playing needed those 2 strings because I’m not a lead guitar player.
I’m a terrible lead guitar player. I tried for years and years, and I’ve practiced and practiced, to become a good lead guitar player and I have not been able to do that. I’ve just accepted that and I’m fine with it. I’ve been using 4 strings most of my career. The G string of the guitar, which is usually not wound, I’ve realized has to be wound because it sounds fatter. It’s gonna be in tune and I needed to have it, otherwise it was pointless. That’s how I get the fat guitar sound. I make sure the first four strings are wound and they’re heavier.
It’s like the difference between fishing line and rope. You wouldn’t use fishing line to pull a person. That’s the only way I can explain it. What’s interesting to me that I recently figured out is that now I have to use 5 strings because a lot of the riffs on Camp Pain and Synergy are now, I have to have 5 strings. *laughs* I’m moving up. Eventually I’ll be back to playing 6 strings on the guitar *laughs*, but I don’t think I’m gonna be able to find a wound B string. I’ll look!
Someone will have to invent it!
DM: I’ll just use a D and wind it really, really tight *laughs*.
Do you find it more liberating creating music with 96 Bitter Beings as opposed to CKY?
DM: Yeah, we were like family. We were brothers. We spent so much time together, but when you become so close you’re able to say whatever you want to the other person. Most of the time it was fine, but when it was bad, it was bad. It would cause all kinds of problems. CKY on tour…I don’t even know how to explain it. It put Mötley Crüe to shame *laughs* we were so ridiculous. I wish I could remember some of the really bad stuff, but I was so pickled.
There was a routine to the CKY show. You got a little bit drunk before and completely drunk afterwards. Then you got on a $50,000 tour bus that we rented and were paying for and you brought people on the bus with you and you partied more until you passed out. A couple days later, you realize that somebody who was supposed to go home 2 days ago is still on the bus. There’s so much shit that I can’t even remember it, not because I was just so pickled and fucked up, but because so many things happened that just stopped shocking me.
Eventually, when you play 6, 7, 800 shows or whatever we did, each stop is a different story. Now it’s different. I used to be the guy on the CKY tour bus that would say “Everybody out!” Even though I was completely out of my mind, I knew that it was smart to make people leave so that whoever was there to plan on getting hurt or claim they were raped or whatever was gonna leave. Now that’s the biggest problem with bands. The groupies are gone. They’re scared. And you don’t know what they’re gonna say when they leave. I foresaw that and knew it was coming in a way.
It’s different now because we put everything into the show and we don’t put anything into the party. We have a good time doing the show. It’s a longer show. CKY used to do an hour, hour and 10. My goal for every show that we’ve done so far is 2 hours. Depending on how late it is or how much time the venue gives us or if the crowd is exhausted, usually they are allowed to mosh at the shows that we’ve been to, which is cool. Moshing is very important to me because it’s exercise, but I like putting on a 2 hour show. I like to be exhausted when I get off stage, and it’s hard to get off stage because it’s the best thing in my life.
Ironically, I have tremendous stage fright. Every single show, I am embarrassed to get up in front of people. It takes a good 2 minutes from that beginning of the show where I think back to high school and middle school where people were gonna say things about me. They were gonna hurt my feelings or whatever. Then I get up onstage and the crowd is like, “Let’s do it!” I kick into adrenaline mode and it’s a good 2 hours. I like to exhaust the band and move on.
Nowadays, that’s the legally safest way to go. You don’t want to bring strangers back to party who might say, “96 gave us a poisoned beer man!” Some girl can say…you know what they can say. It’s 2022 and you have to be aware of that. Some bands aren’t, but what I do and what I have done has never been more important to me than today, October 11. That’s all I can say. Each day I get stronger and stronger.
And you’re in a unique spot where you can go out and do a 2 hour set. Not a lot of bands have the catalog, let alone the fortitude, to do so.
DM: It’s hard because I’m sitting there like, “OK, we gotta make sure we play the classics. We gotta play the new awesome songs.” By the time we’re done writing the list, there’s 25 songs. “We can’t play 25 songs!” “OK, let’s break it down to 21. Let’s lose 4. We can do that.” That’s what we usually do, but to satisfy that urge of playing the songs that are cut, we do them the next night. Every night is a different set. It’s really frustrating because there are certain songs I know don’t work in a live setting, and that’s fine.
There’s a lot of great songs that don’t work live. But when you have so many songs that you haven’t played live in twenty something years and you may not be able to play them that night, it gets kind of frustrating when you put them on the list and then you have to cross them out in favor of something else. At least we have the ability to change up our set every night, as opposed to bands who go on tour playing 60 shows and it’s the same show every single night. The same stage presence every single night. The same choreography every single night. We’re not at that stage to do so and we’ll never be at that stage to do so because we’ll never do that. I want every show to be different.
One of those things is when I bring somebody up out of the audience to sing something. That happens usually when I lose my voice. On this last tour, I got COVID. I couldn’t sing because my throat was so sore and I had a mask on. I said, “If you know the songs, get up here and fucking sing them.” Nobody had a better time than that night. It was just amazing. I wasn’t singing anything, but people were coming up and being involved with the show. They were having such a good time to the point where I thought, “Should I always be sick?” *laughs*
It’s an interesting concept. Maybe the fans should be able to get up onstage and sing a song. I have these ideas. Some are stupid. Some are interesting. Some I want to try and make work. Imagine Metallica playing a stadium and they pick somebody out in the audience, a contest winner or something, and they get up onstage to sing “Battery” or “Enter Sandman” or something. That would be so cool. We’ll see. It’ll probably be something that I try to get happening all the time first. I’d be proud to do something different.
Live shows are live shows, but being sick has made me think of other ways to get around doing the show instead of having to cancel it. I’ve had people come up and play guitar. If I break a string, they come up and they play guitar and they fucking kill it. I love to get the audience involved. I like to talk to as many fans as I can. I get messaged all the time. I get emails. I try to respond to everybody. One of the best parts of doing this “job”, if you can call it that, is being like a psychologist in a sense.
A lot of the problems that younger fans are having are problems that I’ve experienced. They’re gonna listen to me if I tell them a good way to get around it or through it. They take that advice seriously. That’s really powerful to me as well. So it’s not just music. It’s this connection to the fans. It’s just great. I’m really lucky, everyone that gets to do this is really lucky to be doing this. It’s a lot of hard work, but it pays off.
What are your plans for the rest of the year and going into 2023?
DM: I want to tour Europe. I want to do a second leg of our North American tour. 2020, we did February and March. The pandemic started in March of 2020. And then when it became OK to tour again, we weren’t allowed in Canada, so when we were booked on our July/August tour this summer, we just went and did it and had a good time. I’m all about getting out there and playing shows, which I never thought I would say because I’m not a traveler. I don’t like to travel. I don’t like to fly. It scares me to death, but I’m willing to do it. It’s irrational that it scares me, but I’m willing to do it just to get to as many people as possible. To all the people that are like, “Why won’t you come here? Why won’t you come there?” I do want to come there eventually.
The next month is gonna be enjoyable because it’s all about…it’s like waiting for Christmas. Synergy Restored comes out November 4, kind of like how Santa Claus comes on December 25. I’m like, “What’s gonna happen with this record? Is it gonna be a mind blowing response? Is it gonna be lukewarm? Is it gonna be nothing?” I believe that it’s gonna be big. Even if it’s not right away, I think it’s gonna spread by, like I said earlier, word of mouth. I’m really excited to just spend the rest of 2022 seeing how Synergy Restored latches onto people heads and a lot of guitar players trying to learn the songs. I know that even people who don’t play guitar are going to enjoy this music, so I wanna spend the rest of this year enjoying and celebrating this release of the album. Then next year, I wanna hit everyone with the band coming to their town.
The new 96 Bitter Beings album, Synergy Restored, comes out Friday, November 4 on Nuclear Blast. For more information on Deron Miller and 96 Bitter Beings, visit www.facebook.com/96BBmusic.