HELMET Mainman Discusses Lineup Changes, Producing Other Bands

Patrick Douglas of The Culture Shock recently conducted an interview with HELMET mainman Page Hamilton. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

The Culture Shock: How's life been treating you lately?

Page Hamilton: Life's good. I can't complain. I just finished producing an album last night, or I hope I'm done. Hopefully the label will accept it and pay me the backend of my money. That was a really good experience. Great band out of North Carolina, completely unknown, called CLASSIC CASE. I got to do string arrangements on a couple of songs. It was fun.

The Culture Shock: Is that something that you're going to be more involved in down the road? Producing?

Page Hamilton: Yeah. It's one thing that I love. I like doing the Helmet thing a lot. I like the music side of the HELMET thing. I'm growing a little weary of keeping the band together. It's not easy. I have a brand new group of guys and we might end up playing Vegas at the premiere of this movie. It'll probably be the first show with three brand new guys that I've never played with before. That's kind of tiresome. As far as the music goes, that's a great thing. I also love getting to work on movies once or twice a year. I worked on one last year and I'm hopefully going to do some work on one this week again. That's really fun. Producing's a blast, most of the time.

The Culture Shock: Speaking of the band member thing. Is it difficult for you to get into a steady groove when you're constantly having to replace band members?

Page Hamilton: Yeah, I guess that's part of it. There are a couple of problems with having a band right now. One of them is there are a million bands out there, so people have to choose between bands. I've found that, I don't know if it's kids, I say kids being people that are twenty and younger. I'm not sure half of them are into music as they are the outfits and their perception of the band, so you gotta kind of compete with that as well, and that means fewer people are gonna be going to a show by a band that are an underground sounding … a band like today's standards and doesn't have a shtick, like hair or makeup or anything. Just an old dude that likes to scream. So, that's kind of tough in keeping the band together. Economically, if things were booming, it wouldn't be difficult at all. I know TOOL goes out in Enormodomes and they do great, you know what I mean? I don't think they have a hard time keeping the band together, as far as I know. I have to pay people to play with me and I don't make a lot of money. But, it's really fun. Every time I plug in and start to play all my troubles go away.

The Culture Shock: Does it get frustrating for you? Like you said, you're competing with bands that are more about selling t-shirts at Hot Topic than producing music. Do you get frustrated having to compete against that or do you prefer to not even consider it a competition?

Page Hamilton: When my booking agent and my manager say "I can't get any guarantees for you," or "I can't book the tour because it's not economically feasible," then I get frustrated. I've been fortunate enough. The thing with HELMET at this point is, it's kind of on life support and if opportunities arise than I'll consider them. I don't hold anything against those bands. I never gave a crap about all that stuff that was going on in the late '80s when I formed the band. I didn't see it as competition, but now I'm like, "OK, it does make it kind of tough to play," but I don't stress on that too much. I might end up managing a Starbucks in a couple of months (laughs),but who knows?

The Culture Shock: That's been your perception of the problem? That people have decided they can't make enough money with HELMET and they've moved on?

Page Hamilton: I don't know, that's kind of part of it. It's tough. Every band mate I've ever had has been like if we're opening for somebody and if we're playing with different bands, they're confused by the bands that we're playing with or frustrated with … "These guys aren't very good." That's true, but what do you do? They're paying us to open up for them and you open up for them. Everybody wants their band to do well. Fortunately I have my little cocoon. My lifestyle is not excessive. I live in a one-bedroom duplex and I have a car and I have a cool rehearsal space that I can jam in. My extravagances are that I have a couple of really cool guitars and I spend money on my rig, so I don't have this pressure to make this mortgage on my mansion or anything. I find that to be a better way to live because my focus every time I sit down is on music and not on "Jesus, I gotta make a living here. What can I do?" A record label, they're gonna be like, "You should do this. You should do that. You should do the other thing," and it's based strictly on "We wanna sell records." Which I understand, they're in the business of selling records, but you've gotta say "That's kind of cheesy, I don't wanna do that." When they said, "Would you object to having a song on the 'Saw' soundtrack?" I said "Absolutely not." It's a movie and they're not coming in and telling me how to write my songs. So, my songs goes in the movie and on the soundtrack exactly the way I envisioned it. You have to kind of pick your battles, I think, as a musician. If someone's like do you want to play with band "XYZ" and I'm like "If band XYZ will pay me enough money to pay my band mates and a couple of crew guys then I'll absolutely consider it." If they want me to go out for nothing then I'm not gonna do it. You have to take economics into consideration. I lost money on the Warped Tour. Out of my own pocket. I paid money for the privilege of playing my own songs for two months in front of people in 105-degree heat. Was it worth it? For me it was, 'cause I got to play every day. I got to play 50 shows. It was fun for me.

Read the entire interview at www.thecultureshock.com.