2019.03.17 - Appetite For Distortion - Interview with Brain

Transcription of the part about The General and Seven:
---------------------------------------------------------------

Brain: Well, I want to backtrack for a second.

Brando: Sure.

Brain: Because we were talking about Tommy and you just mentioned the song, The General and it’s funny, because I have a story. Because, you know, this album that I’m making right now with some old friends, we just decided to kind of… it started out as bowling night out type thing, where I have a friend that has this rad studio in Berkeley, and he was like, “Hey Brain, I’m taking off to Mexico or something for a couple of months to work on this project. You can just have the studio, and come in and jam, and do stuff”. So I called up my friend Mirv [Marc Haggard] who was part of the Limbomaniacs with me and stuff like that, and my friend Extrakd [Steve Freeman], who was kind of like a dj who worked on this El Stew album that Bucket actually played on also along with this dj Eddie Def and dj Disk, and then Bucket was on it and stuff. So, it’s funny, because how The General came about was, we were supposed to – you know, this was like building up to that show [House of Blues]. We were supposed to – well, not supposed to, but everybody was like, “Hey, if anybody’s got songs and shit, you can bring them in”. And so that song, The General, was a song that… you know, Extrakd and Mirv and I, when I wasn’t doing Guns stuff, we’d just jam in my living room type of thing. You know, we had, like, a ProTools setup and we were jamming, and we were trying to come up with songs for Guns. And, you know, we had this song called… we called it “The General” because we were eating General’s chicken.

Brando: Okay... (laughs).

Brain: But when I turned it in to Axl, he thought it was called “The General” because I was kind of making fun of Tommy, as Tommy was the band's, you know, kind of like the MD, he was like the musical director when we’d have rehearsals. And he thought I was poking fun at Tommy as being like a general, you know, like, “Okay, we’re rehearsing at this time” and that kind of shit. And I was like, “No, dude, it was because we ate General’s chicken.”

Brando: (Laughs)

Brain: You know, it’s funny, because you said “General” and it all comes back around. Because, you know, we were writing all these crazy songs to try to turn in and these were coming from, like, you know, Extrakd is an old school dj type – he’s a bass player, but he loves old school break beats and, you know, cratedigger type of guy – and so this shit we were putting together was crazy. You know, we were just kind of going like, “Okay, what samples should we find for Axl?” Like, “Well, he’s kind of like Julius Caesar”, so we were sampling Julius Caesar, looking for albums, you know, and old school crazy shit. And I think we sampled, like, Ben Hur and chopped it up and cut it up, and that became a jam called “Seven” – I think we called it “Seven”. And I remember bringing that to the studio to have – I think Roy Thomas Baker was producing at that point and, you know, we’d be playing the stuff and he’d be in. Like, one of the songs that actually is called – the album that we’re making now is called Mars Mechanics and one of the songs we have on the album, we put that on the album, and it was one of the ones that I played for Roy, and, you know, he was like, “What is this, reggae?” And I was just like, “No”, because it was like a Neil Young old school jam that, you know, Mirv was just going off on. But the whole thing was just like, you know, I was turning in all these weirdo songs that were coming, like, way far to the left or whatever, and it was just kind of a crazy story of how that’s… one of them was The General and I think Axl actually sang on The General.