dUg Pinnick (King’s X) Interview

There are power trios, and then there is King’s X. While other bands hop from trend to trend, pining for commercial success, King’s X has stuck to their guns from day 1, influencing a slew of bands along the way. From Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, to Pantera and Smashing Pumpkins, King’s X singlehandedly shaped the trajectory of the entire 90s rock landscape. Simply put, they are your favorite band’s favorite band. Going off that thought process, your favorite rockstar’s favorite album of 2022 is bound to be Three Sides of One, the first King’s X album in 14 years. We had the chance to sit down with King’s X bassist/singer/songwriter dUg Pinnick to discuss this new album, his creative process, growing wiser with age, and inevitably, the Pantera reunion.

Greetings dUg and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?

dUg Pinnick: I’m doing great! No complaints *laughs*.

No complaints here either! As a King’s X diehard myself, I’m eluded for the release of your upcoming album, Three Sides of One, and was lucky enough to check it out early. Per usual, it rocks.

DP: Thank you!

14 years have passed since King’s X’s last studio album, XV. What factors led to such a wait for this one?

DP: We just weren’t ready to make a record. We wanted it to be the best thing that we’ve ever done from our standpoint. We just didn’t feel like we had it to give at the moment, so everyone kind of took a vacation. I did a whole lot of side projects *laughs*.

You have remained active outside of King’s X, releasing solo albums and working on projects like Grinder Blues and Poundhound. For you, is there a difference between writing for King’s X and writing for a solo or side project?

DP: No, I write to sing, always. Whoever wants to work on the song with me, they’re more than welcome, but I always do that. With KXM and PGP, a lot of those songs we wrote together. But with Trace Mountains, which was with Jeff Ament and Mike McCready, we wrote everything together. All my side projects, most of them are collaborations. We just get in a room and jam it out. But with King’s X, and not just with King’s X, I write music all the time. That’s what I’ve been doing since I was 18. I’ve always got 20 or 30 new songs under my belt if somebody wants to make a record *laughs*.

Did you find it hard in the last couple years to not be able to get in a room with musicians and “jam it out” so to speak? Did that impact your creative process at all?

DP: No, my life didn’t change when COVID happened. I’m still at home by myself writing music in front of my computer. For me, life just kept going on. It was kind of nice actually not to go anywhere. I got really lazy. Going to clubs, going to see bands play, I was always active. All of a sudden, I got to stay home for a year and I kind of got used to it *laughs*.

You, me, and the rest of the world!

DP: Yep *laughs*!

Leading up to the making of this album, what were your biggest inspirations lyrically and musically?

DP: Turning 70. The biggest thing for me is writing lyrics about how I see the world now in a poetic way, and what’s going around me at the same time. All of those songs were written before the pandemic, so we had an idea of what’s going on with politics, the way people hate each other, and all the bullshit that’s going on. We’re gonna sing about it, but we’re gonna try to do it in a way that doesn’t just sound like we’re trying to preach to the crowd and say the same old thing that you’ve already heard.

Nowadays, you have to be so careful with the words you use or you’ll automatically be put on one side or the other here in the US. I’m a problem solver. I like to fix things. My problem is I try to fix things that can’t be fixed. I’ve always tried to logically figure out why the world could not get along. Now I’ve gotten to a point where they can’t get a long and that’s the way it is. I see things differently, so I write about them differently now *laughs*.

That last assessment of people not being able to get along, is that your biggest change of perspective in the past 35 years with King’s X?

DP: No, my biggest change of perspective is turning 70. I’ll be 72 next month. Right after I turned 70 is when we started making this record. It seems like every 10 years you have a different outlook on life in general, because you got 10 more years behind you that you learned from, and or not learned from. I’ve looked at 70 years of my life and saw so many things I needed to just let go of because it was doing nothing good for me. I started doing more positive things and started to appreciate what was around me and appreciate the things that I’ve done that I’ve always hated.

We’re tortured artists, so we don’t like anything we do. I had to sit down and try to appreciate what I’ve done my whole life. I’ve been making music and I’ve put out so many albums and side projects. I need to look at that and go, “This is what you’ve done dUg. Be proud of it.” Instead of going, “I gotta write that song!” I’m always looking a head instead of looking around me. It made me stop and smell the roses. That’s what I’m trying to say. And the people around me too. That love, the compassion and understanding, the forgiveness, the whole general output of people that are in my life; I’ve learned to appreciate them in spite of me.

The first single off this album is the heavy and soulful “Let It Rain”. How did this song come about and why did the band feel it was right to release first?

DP: Our producer, Michael Parnin, wanted to release it. I wouldn’t have picked it, but I don’t pick songs anyways cuz it’s always the wrong song. I wrote the music about a year before the pandemic. Like I said, when I turned 70, I started looking around at the world. I thought, people need more compassion and love. Water washes things away. What a metaphor to say, “Let it rain and wash the fear away.” Basically saying, the reason why we’re having problems is because we’re all afraid of fear. Why stand up and go, “You’re afraid, so stop being afraid!” Write a song about it. That’s what we do, so that’s how that came about.

You talk about that love and compassion surrounding the band. Whenever I’m at one of your shows, I notice that everyone in the crowd lets their guard down. We’re all bonded by the music you 3 create, and it’s truly a beautiful thing.

DP: Thank you.

Does that ever take you aback? Is there any one show or moment that stands out to you that made you think, “This is larger than the music.”

DP: They’re all like that. That’s the great thing about it. From the beginning, even when there were 3 people in the audience, they were up on their feet yelling and screaming. It’s always been that way. We never appealed to the masses, but the ones that love us? Man, they let us know it, in every way you can think of. They still do, from buying merch to buying our records. They just want to support King’s X. It’s like a family.

People have gotten married meeting at a King’s X show. Guys have told me that if their girlfriends didn’t like King’s X they’d break up with them. I’m going, “This is deep!” When someone says, “My wife put the gun down when she heard Gretchen (Goes to Nebraska). Me and my son thank you.” Woah…OK! For me, I’ve heard those stories as long as I’ve been making music. It’s always kind of went in one ear and out the other, not as I didn’t care or didn’t want to hear it. I was so focused on making the music to hopefully make that happen to people, when I didn’t realize it was always going on around me.

I try to tell musicians all the time, “30 years from now, someone’s gonna come up to you and say they’re alive because they heard you playing that crappy bar and there were only 8 people in there and you hated that night. And you smile at them.” Always remember that. You’re always on call.

King’s X has always been hard to pin down musically, playing a variety of styles and essentially being a vehicle for creative freedom. Has there ever been a genre or approach that a member wanted to experiment with, but ultimately the band decided wasn’t for the best?

DP: No, we’ve never done that. I’m the one that brings in the crazy shit; the weird djent riffs with blues or something. I’ll come in and I’ll program my drum machine and I’ll be trying to get that Meshuggah thing happening. I’ll show the guys the song. Jerry will look at it and go, “I’m doing my own thing.” He’ll turn it into the John Bonham vibe that he has, which turns it into a King’s X song. That’s the fun of playing with King’s X. At first it was a nightmare for me because I wanted my songs like they’re supposed to sound, the way I wrote them.

I spend a lot of time finishing a song and putting it out on my own. When I get with King’s X, that’s when I realize my shit does stink and somebody needs to help me shine it up a little bit *laughs*. That’s the thing about playing with those guys. There’s never been a song that we said, “It’s not our thing.” We’ve got a couple punk rock songs. We’ve got a couple 900 MPH songs. Then we’ve got sludge songs. We’ve got gospel songs. We’ve got metal songs. We’ve got “chunk ka kunk” songs. I remember I wrote one song and I was listening to Scorpions’ Lovedrive album. You could imagine what I came up with on that one!

We just love music and we’re inspired by all those bands. We like to take things from them and borrow from them and manipulate it to make it a King’s X song. It’s the same thing everybody else does. Nobody invented anything. They try to tell you, “I came up with that.” That’s bullshit. Somebody already did it. Even when I say, “I came up with that.” Someone says, “No you didn’t. You heard somebody else do it even though everybody else thought you did.” *laughs* You know what I’m saying?

Yep! That’s just how it goes. What qualities do Ty and Jerry bring out in you as a musician? In return, do you find yourself pushing them to the fullest extent of their abilties?

DP: Well they push my insecurities because they’re not afraid to tell me if they don’t like something *laughs*. You walk through life and everybody goes, “You’re great! You’re great! I love it! I love it!” Then somebody who’s honest with you comes up and goes, “That has good potential. Maybe we can make it better.” And your heart sinks. You go, “You’re right. I am human.” *laughs* We forget. That’s what they do with me and I think I do that to them too. They’ve let me know in some ways, and I think that’s the beautiful thing about the 3 of us.

We push each other into a zone that we’re not comfortable in, and then we make ourselves comfortable in it. When you walk away, it’s three sides of one. It’s bigger than the 3 of us. It doesn’t matter what other groups the 3 of us are in outside of King’s X or solo albums or anything that we do. There’s no magic like King’s X when we get together because we play within each other’s nuances. It’s not about the notes, the beat, the timing. It’s all about feeling each other’s every move and moving with them.

We’ve played so long with each other that I know exactly what to feel when they’re feeling something. It’s like we’ve all emotionally locked into each other in some way. It’s not that we understand each other or are on the same reality. There’s something that connects us. It’s like an amoeba and it never goes out of whack. Even when we fuck up and it’s bad, we’ll just stop, look at each other, and go, “Oh! We screwed up!” in front of a whole crowd and start back up again. We just don’t care. When you’re doing it, you’re just doing it.

It’s taken me 40 years to even try to explain what I feel in King’s X because it’s always been a mystery to me. I’ve always heard what other people tell me and its been overwhelming. The only thing I can think of is, “Well, there are bands who did that to me. That must be what it’s like.” So I smile, keep on going, and try to write another song. *laughs* Woah that was a long speech!

I love it man! That’s why we’re here, to get your perspective on things.

DP: Cool *laughs*!

Earlier we mentioned some of your side projects. Back in the early 2000s, you were involved in a project called Supershine with Trouble guitarist Bruce Franklin. Would you ever consider doing another album with him?

DP: Oh yeah, Supershine! I always forget about that. We thought about it and nothing arrived. We were trying to get a record company involved in it and we couldn’t get anyone to really bite. The truth of the matter is, around that time, about 8 years ago, nobody was getting a record deal. You know how it was. You thought music was dead. No one was willing to take a chance. We have a couple songs in the archives. Maybe I’ll get to throw them out there one day, talk Bruce into it or something.

It was a lot of fun making the record with him. I loved Trouble. Bruce came in with all these riffs and I thought, “Well, here we go!” *imitates guitar* “gung-gung-a-gung-gung-a-gung-gung-a-gung-gung-a-gung-chunk-chunk!” That’s Bruce *laughs*! He is the originator of doom metal. Before Metallica, before all that stuff, after Black Sabbath, Bruce never let go of that. He just carried that flag on into today. *laughs* It’s amazing for someone to be that focused. It’s awesome.

There’s no shortage of bands influenced by King’s X, one such band being Pantera. What are your thoughts on Phil Anselmo and Rex Brown reuniting next year under the Pantera name?

DP: *laughs* You know, they gotta do what they gotta do. Every band is different. I’m not behind those closed doors and I’m not hearing the arguments or pros and cons of it. All I know is I’m hearing people complaining left and right. At the end of the day, it ain’t nobody’s goddamn business why they’re doing it or how we should feel about it. Either we support it or we don’t go. That’s how I look at it. I love those guys. All 4 of them and Rita (Haney), I love them all equally. I’ve watched them go through so much, through the years from the beginning. Well not from the beginning, but ’88 was when I first met them, before they got a record deal. We’ve all been running neck and neck and I got to hang out with them all and I love them all.

We all know that if an original member isn’t in the band, it’s gonna be different. A lot of bands go out there, keep the moniker, and it’s only one member of the band. Let’s say Lynyrd Skynyrd’s out there with nobody except Rickey Medlocke and he was in the original band before they had a record out. That was the stipulation, but people still have a great time. It’s their business. As for King’s X, if someone passed away, it would never happen again. There’s just 3 of us. What do you do? With King’s X, I don’t think anyone could match that.

But then you gotta look on the other hand, 40 years, 30 years, 25 years later, there’s kids that weren’t born that wanna go see that. My twenty something friends, they go, “I don’t care dUg! It’s Pantera! We didn’t get to see that when we were your age, so we’re going!” There’s so many different aspects to it. For someone to have an opinion and to think that it should matter is delusional *laughs*.

Amen!

DP: Amen man.

From a bassist’s perspective, what are your favorite King’s X songs to play live?

DP: “Far, Far Away”, that song is so much fun to play. It just flows and I can sing it without…Ty wrote that song and I love it. “Mission”, there’s so much going on in that song on bass. You probably don’t hear it, but I overplayed on that song. “Black the Sky” is, for me…the outcome of that song is exactly what I wanted. I felt it. It was fat. It was thick. It was depressing. It rocked. It had every element in it. I finally got my chance to speak about my depression in a way that was poetic *laughs*. That’s one of the few King’s X that I felt I nailed what I was trying to do. Whether people liked it or not didn’t matter. I want everyone to love everything that I do. Don’t we all? But I would be delusional to even think that 1% will. If I can get 1%, I’m doing pretty good *laughs*.

I know you guys are gearing up to do some shows in the UK, and hopefully some here as well. How many songs off Three Sides of One can fans expect to hear live?

DP: Well I don’t know when we’ll be playing next. We had to cancel the European tour. Ty has an immune problem and his doctors told him he shouldn’t go, so we had to cancel that. We can do weekend gigs, so we’ve got a few shows coming up in about 2 months. Some Texas dates. I think Nashville, but we’re not playing too much until he gets well. The plan is to do the whole record, or as much as we can of it. I think we can do 80% of it, and we want to. I can’t wait.

I’m just done doing those old songs. We’ve done them for so long. “Over My Head”? Oh my God. We’ve done it for so long that I don’t want to do it anymore. I feel that we’ve got new songs and a new attitude. It’s hard singing a lot of your old songs when they’re psychologically so deep and came from a point where you were expressing your feelings. Then to sing something about a childhood trauma that I’ve been over, and I’m a better person because of it, it’s hard to sing about that and hear people go, “Oh man, I’m so sorry for your childhood.” I’m going, “That’s over!”

People forget that, for me anyways, songs that I write are the soundtrack of my life. Maybe other people write songs with whatever their lyrics are, but it’s always about where I’m at at that moment in my mind. That’s what I’m gonna sing about.

The new King’s X album, Three Sides of One, comes out Friday, September 2 on InsideOut Music. For more information on King’s X, visit www.kingsxrocks.com. For more information on dUg Pinnick, visit www.dugnation.net.