The Obelisk: In Conversation With Stone Axe

JJ Koczan of The Obelisk recently conducted an interview with Stone Axe ‘ T. Dallas Reed . A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

When I spoke to Stone Axe multi-instrumentalist, occasional-vocalist, recording engineer and principle songwriter, T. Dallas Reed, he was, as I imagine he often is, working in his HeavyHead studio in his native Port Orchard, Washington. His prolific nature is evident in the sheer number of releases Stone Axe has had in the last two years or so, including two full-lengths, numerous splits and singles, compilation appearances, and so forth. Stone Axe II, the second long player, was recently released via Reed‘s own Music Abuse Records, and already there’s word of a new split with weedian Brooklyn mischief-making punkers Mighty High through Ripple Music, out just in time for the band to hit the road alongside the legendary Saint Vitus later this week. He just keeps going.

The mission of Stone Axe is simple: To preserve and honor the godfathers of the heavy ’70s, and unlike the myriad retro acts out there whose vacuous posturing is more chic now than it ever was then, Reed prefers to focus on sonic orthodoxy in the songwriting and recording as a means for expressing his love of this sound. Through Stone Axe II and the band’s 2009 self-titled predecessor, joined by vocalist Dru Brinkerhoff, Reed has molded his guns and stuck readily by them, resulting in some of the most prudent classic rock to come along since before it was classic.

The Obelisk: So before you start writing a Stone Axe song, do you say to yourself, “Alright, I want to sound like this band” and work from that?

T. Dallas Reed: It’ll go both ways on that. Sometimes it’ll be, “I can’t get this song out of my head, I would love to record a song that has that same feel and that same sound.” So I go for the feel of the song and I go for the audio, for the sound. I’ll try to make it sound like a certain recording as well. Trying to do that, that’s a challenge to me, trying to get the same sounds as these old bands had. It can go either way.

I’ve definitely said, “Hey, I want a song that sounds like that.” Like “Turn to Stone” sounds like Procol Harum meets Blind Faith to me. It’s obvious where that came from, and as long as you can do it without it being bad or there being nothing horrible about it – I think at this point we’re pulling it off. I can’t foresee the future, like, how long are we going to be able to do this? To get away with it? But I don’t really care, I’m just having fun making music that I dig. That’s right now, anyway.

The Obelisk: What was it that initially led you to make Stone Axe a separate entity from Mos Generator? Was the idea to make a band with this sound so specific that it needed to be a new project, or do you think it could have been done with Mos Generator?

T. Dallas Reed: We were going in that direction on, Mos was, on this record called The Vault Sessions. It has a way less heavy tone to it, and I had written some songs during that period that could have ended up on that but never got realized. Those leftovers I decided to start demoing myself. That would have been “Riders of the Night” and those first Stone Axe tunes. As I finished the tracks, I’m like, “Man, Dru would sound good on this.”

I’d played with Dru in other bands, and he’d actually sang when we did a Zeppelin tribute night, so it was Mos with Dru singing, doing covers and stuff like that. I figured he’d be good for that, and it went from there. That was really cool, it was so easy. He came in, nailed it in one or two takes, and the feel was all there. So that’s how that started. It came out of Mos’ leftovers. It certainly could have went that way. Mos could have stayed in that Vault Sessions-type feel, but this seems to have worked out a little better for those kinds of songs.

Continue reading: Stone Axe Interview with T. Dallas Reed: The Importance of Being Self-Reliant | The Obelisk.

Tags: Classic Rock, Dru Brinkerhoff, heavy 70's, HeavyHead studio, JJ Koczan, stone axe, T. Dallas Reed, The Obelisk

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 8:59 am and is filed under 2010, Interviews, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.