Interview with Matt Fox of Bitter End while on tour for their album "Harsh Realities"
 

How long has the band been together?

MF  Bitter End have been together for about 5 years now. Me and my brother Chris Fox the bass player, I'm Matt Fox the guitar player and singer, have been playing together for some time. We started playing with Harry Dearinger, the drummer in 1985, played together for awhile. I started singing in 1988 and got the album deal and all that, and right before we went in and made the album we got Russ Stefanovich the guitar player, got him at the beginning of this year. So we've basically been together and playing all over with the name Bitter End for 5 years now.
 

Where have you toured so far?

MF  Mostly the west coast, southwest. This is our first time into Canada. We've done Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico, California, a bunch of California dates, Oregon, Washington, Idaho. We've done eastern Washington stuff on our own. We've kind of gotten around but still mostly in the western United States and we're just starting to hit Canada now.
 

What do you think of Vancouver so far?

MF  I like Vancouver. I've been to Vancouver before because I live in Seattle, as does the rest of the band. We've been up here. It's a fun town. We haven't had a chance to play yet so I have no idea what it's going to be like up there on stage yet. It looks like it's a small stage. But it seems like a real nice town - I like it. I'd just like to come up here and play more often. Since we live in the neighbourhood we won't necessarily have to be touring to do it you know, we'll be coming back up to play.
 

Who are your influences?

MF  Influences, god we've got all kinds of influences. Anything hard rock from about, say like Cream on through Metallica and everything else. Big influences I guess for this band would be Sabbath, Rush, Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, to a lesser extent some jazz stuff. A whole bunch of different stuff. We were influenced by a lot of different music, some jazz fusion like Al Di Meola. A whole bunch of different things sort of went into what is now Bitter End.
 

Where do you get ideas for songs?

MF  It varies. Some things like Just Say Yes I was sitting in a class back when I was in school and it just sort of came to me as a song, and I wrote it all 'bang' one day it was done. Usually they start with guitar riffs, I'll be either tweaking around on the guitar or imagine something in my head and I'll work it out on guitar, and they just sort of grow from that. Sometimes I'll get a whole bunch of ideas together and I'll bring them to the band to arrange them and the lyrics come after. Once in awhile the lyrics come first. Whatever inspires me - watching the news, or just whatever, everyday life incidents. The song Guilty is about a party we played in Snohomish Wa. where like the cops showed up and I asked him at the door "Ok you're coming in, can I see your search warrent?" and he goes "Don't make me take you to jail too" and that's when I knew I was guilty until proven innocent, which is the topic of that song. I got a good song out of it even though it was kind of a bummer of an experience at the time.
 

What was it like when you were recording "Harsh Realities"?

MF  Recording was great. We worked with Randy Burns who's a really good producer. Did it in Los Angeles, we drove down in the middle of a February snowstorm from hell, drove down through the ice and snow to sunny southern California. Did it real quick, we worked our asses off. We did it in 13 studio days, took about 3 weeks total including days off. Worked from basically 9:30 - 10 in the morning until, god anywhere from midnight to 3 or 4 in the morning, and just worked real hard and it was a lot of fun. It was really exhilarating. First time I'd ever worked in a really good studio like that with a really good producer.
 

How do you feel the album turned out?

MF  I think it's pretty good. All things considered I think for a first album it's really great. I mean I'm really proud of it for a first record. There are little things here or there I would have done differently. If we'd had more time and money I think I would have messed around, experimented a little more with different guitar sounds and stuff, you know just the stuff that you go back and second guess on. But all things considered I think it's a real good representation of what the band sounds like live. It's a real good raw live statement of what our stuff is.
 

Actually, what's your favorite song to play live?

MF  Favorite song live, oh god, it depends on the night. I really enjoy playing Living Hell a lot live. I really enjoy doing all the album. Profits is a lot of fun to play live 'cause it's really challenging. Guilty's fun to play 'cause it's a really easy groove oriented song and you always get a great pit for it. It really varies, some crowds just want to hear the really thrashy stuff, other crowds will really thrash hard for stuff like Harsh Realities that's a little more groove oriented. I'm pretty happy playing the whole thing live.
 

Have you heard anything recently that you really like?

MF  Yeah new Sacred Reich, and that was before we got on the tour. It's a fantastic record. I think that's a great record. Actually there's a lot of good stuff out right now. A lot of the new rap stuff is really pretty cool. The Alice in Chains album is a good record. Let me think, what am I listening to a whole bunch that just came out? Scatterbrain was a great record, we got to play a date with them in Seattle and that was a lot of fun, real good band and real fun guys. I think that's one of the better records in the last year. I think my favorite thrash record of the last year is the new Sacred Reich, and that's unbiased, that's really my opinion. I really think that, it's a great record.
 

What do you do in your spare time?

MF  Drink beer and well, I won't talk about smoking, uhm, I smoke a certain funny cigarette that rhymes with lot. I work, I still work a day job when I'm in town and I'm not touring, and in my spare time I just sort of hang out, party, read a newspaper, watch tv, just you know regular everyday guy, not real athletic so I just basically sit around the house and play guitar.
 

Interesting or embarrassing road stories

MF  Well on this tour we've had a couple. We almost got snowed in in Arizona. Took Route 666, that's right aptly name route, from Tuscon Arizona to New Mexico and on the map it was the only way to get from there to New Mexico without driving like 300 miles out of our way. So we're driving and we start and we see the biggest copper mine in the US, it's huge. It's this winding nasty road through this copper mine town and it just keeps climbing and we got to about 8500 feet elevation and it was snowing. The road was like switch-backy we're towing a trailer, you know in a van, we're on this road and we're totally convinced it's snowed in. It's black ice, it's really nasty, still got like another 60 miles to go on this road and we pulled off for the night. We drink a case of beer, totally resigned to sleeping in the van that night 'cause it looked like we were snowed in, and who should go puttering by at about 5 miles an hour but Sacred Reich's tourbus. They were like just cruising real slow, so we got on their butts and tailed them out of there, and just barely made it to gas actually. Just barely made it out of the hills in time before we ran out of gas, and that was really really intense 'cause it was cold as mother outside. I mean it was like 10 degrees out, 15 degrees out (Fahrenheit) really cold, snowed over, it was just really nasty. We wanted to steal a sign but if we'd stopped on a hill we would've never started our van again so that was no go. What other funny stories, uhm. That was one of the funnier ones for sure. We've had other just interesting hairball road stories, I mean just the stuff that happens to everybody, just this and that you know. People slamming, god New Mexico was raging. It was on an Indian reservation, really beautiful place called Red Rock Convention Centre. It was really intense, these kids were just really into it. We spent like a half hour, 45 minutes after the show signing autographs and stuff, and most of these people hadn't even heard of us. We went over really really well there, and it's just been a lot of fun all the way.
 

Do you care whether or not you records get played on commercial radio?

MF  Uhm, I don't care. I mean I'd like to be played on commercial radio, I feel like at this point if bands like Metallica and Anthrax and Megadeth and you know the big 4, Slayer can get played on commercial radio there's no reason why the smaller thrash bands don't get played on commercial radio except that commercial radio will only play big bands. You know what I'm saying, it's like any excuse not to play a thrash band they'll use. If the thrash band eventually reaches the point where they're so big that commercial radio can't ignore it, they'll play it. I have no problem with being played on commercial radio, I prefer college radio because I think it's a lot more adventurous and they're not as inclined to repeat stuff endlessly as commercial radio is, but I want to sell records and there's certainly nothing wrong with commercial radio if you get played on it. It's just I think as an art form it's totally dead, it's completely, it is commercial, it's designed to sell advertising. It has nothing to do with any kind of quality, variety or enlightening function in music, it's just there to sell product to people. But if they want to play me I'm not going to complain.
 

Any plans for the future?

MF  Yeah, we're gonna probably tour again in January, it looks like we're going out with Candlemass and Atheist, doing like a 2 month US tour, we're going to hit the east coast this time. It's about time, we've need to do that for awhile. We just made a video for Harsh Realities. I don't know if MTV is going to play it or not, it's kind of like commercial radio you know, any excuse not to play a thrash band they'll take but it will show up in retail and all the local cable video things that go on all across the country, and Canada too. There's a lot of cable video, it's like the equivalent of college radio you know, public access cable and stuff, and we're aiming for that, retail, if we get on MTV that will be cool. Other than that we want to tour Europe, just stay out there and just keep jamming.
 

Anything else you'd like to say?

MF  Yeah, psyched to play for you Canada and we'll be back. We live in Seattle, we're gonna be coming up here a lot more often now. When we're not on tour we want to be weekend warriors and come out and play places like Vancouver, Victoria, that far north, maybe get back down to Portland, Salt Lake City. We want to just do anything that's within a day driving distance from Seattle, we'll do on a weekend you know if we're not touring 'cause we want to get out there and play for everyone.