Sebastian Bach - Skid Row - Interview 2009-ish

I have been a Skid Row fan since I bought the Monkey Business cassette single when I was 11. Twenty years later I got to interview him for Hammer's My Life Story feature. This is the transcript from that interview.  

WHERE AND WHEN WERE YOU BORN?

“I was born Sebastian Bierk in 1968 in Freeport, Bahamas where my Dad was teaching art. He was in a car crash and my mum was the nurse who picked the rocks out of his face. I was born about nine months later. Bierk is German, but mostly my family is Norwegian.”

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST FORAY INTO MUSIC?

“When I was about eight when my buddy Dixon Davidson said to me, ‘Sebastian, if you join the church choir I get three bucks, and you three bucks a month to sing once a week in church and practise three times a week. I thought, ‘somebody’s gonna fuckin’ pay me to sing?! No fuckin’ way’. The most glorious feeling I had was one Christmas night in the late 70s, when I was singing the high harmony of ‘Gloria In Excelsis Deo’ - Glor-or-or-ooooooooor- ria, in excelsis deo. I was just wailing and it felt incredible.”

WHO WERE YOUR FIRST FAVOURITE ROCK GROUPS?

“The first rocker I ever got into was Elton John. My dad used to play that song, ‘Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)’ and I thought it was heaviest thing I’d ever heard. I saw pictures of Kiss, and I thought they were disgusting. I didn’t know how anyone could listen to a band that looked like that, even though I’d never heard them. Then my buddy asked me if I liked Kiss, I said I didn’t know, so we went to his house and he played me ‘Rock n’ Roll Night’ – which was my favourite song on the radio. I was like, ‘that’s not those guys!’ I couldn’t believe that it was the fire-breathing demons from hell singing aaaaah, wanna rock and roll.”

TELL US ABOUT THE BANDS YOU’VE BEEN IN.

“The first band I was in was called Anthem. We formed at school; Lakefield College School, where Prince Andrew came on a Canadian exchange a year before I arrived. I was singing The Police and Rush in the shower, and these grade 13 guys heard me, and they said ‘was that you in the shower?’ - they’d never wanted to talk to me before – and they invited me to join their band. When I left Lakefield I went to normal school and sang in a band called Bloody Mary. I was hanging out with some older kids would hang out with this band in Toronto – two hours away – and these guys told me to go try out for this band, Kid Wikkid. So I got in my car without telling my parents and drove to this basement in Toronto with all these much older guys all drinking beer. I sang ‘Bloodstone’ by Judas Priest and they said ‘you’re the fucking guy’ so I had to tell my parents that I was moving to Toronto to be a rock star. There was a magazine in Toronto called Metallion, and they put my face in the magazine as a full page pin-up. [The band] Madame X saw this magazine and asked for a demo, when they’d heard it they asked me to join. Then the famous photographer Mark Weiss, took pictures of Madame X, and he knew Skid row. Motley Crue also came to see me in Toronto when I was in another band called VO5 with Alice Cooper guitarist Pete Freezin. So Mark was hanging out with Skid Row and Bon Jovi - because they’d grown up together – and they were looking for a singer for [Skid Row guitarist] Dave ‘The Snake’ Sabo’s band. Mark suggested me, and the rest is Skid-stry.”

WHAT WAS JON BON JOVI’S INVOLVEMENT IN SKID ROW?

“Snake went to school with Jon. And actually Jon’s wife Dorathia, used to go out with Snake. They all used to go to school together and they had this pact that whoever made it first would help the other one. I had just had a baby boy, Paris, and me and wife had just come down from Toronto and didn’t have anywhere to stay, and Jon Bon Jovi put them up for a month and a half at his house. It’s crazy to think that he would put that much faith in me as a singer to have my baby living at his house. Then there was a huge falling out. It was a publishing dispute that Snake and Jon had obviously set up in school. I’m not a businessman at all. It doesn’t interest me. I’m not like Gene Simmons. I hate quibbling, I hate nickel and diming people. If you write a great song you’re set up for life, but if you just sing it, you’re fucked. I don’t have control over the first Skid Row album, because I signed it away and it make me fucking nuts dude. But as time goes by the good memories outweigh the bad – negativity takes up too much energy dude.”

WHY DID YOU LEAVE SKID ROW?

“Dave definitely wanted to change Skid Row’s image. Number one, cut your hair. That’s trivial, but I don’t grow my hair because it’s fucking cool, I grow it because I like the way it fucking looks. I know this is going to the headline [laughs]. I don’t give a fuck what other people do, and music is a form of self-expression. Even in the late 80s I wasn’t wearing things because people told me to. So when it came to the mid 90s and rock was totally at the bottom of the barrel, they weren’t into it any more. They formed a band called Ozone Monday – and you can go listen to it online – and it sounds, they did that before

I never stopped playing these songs. I went on tour in 97. I’ll never stop playing the songs people want me to sing. We’re all lucky to have songs that people fucking like.

I had spent all this time on the phone calling them saying, ‘let’s fucking do something’ because I was fucking bored with the two/three year gaps between records. They didn’t want me to be a songwriter, so when they sent me a demo tape it sucked balls. And I remember expecting it to be better than ‘Monkey Business’ and it was Ozone Monday. So I called them and said, ‘I’m not singing this’, and they said ‘well that’s a drag because you’re gonna have to quit the band’. So I says ‘I’ll never quit this fucking band, let’s just go into the basement and write a good album’. So he screams yurgh yurgh yurgh yurgh… click. It came to Kiss asking us to open up for them in New Jersey on the reunion tour, while Rachel had a side-project with the road crew – the pyrotechs and stuff, called Prunella Scales, and he said he couldn’t do the Skid Row show because he had a gig with his side project. I lost my fucking mind. I rang him up and said ‘let’s fight’ and ‘I’m gonna kick your ass’ [laughs]. Then I did the same thing to Snake. I just wanted to play with fucking Kiss dude, excuse me!”

WHY'D YOU NAME YOUR KIDS PARIS AND LONDON?

WHAT WAS THE MEDIA REACTION TO THE T SHIRT YOU WORE AT THE MTV AWARDS (1989)?

“I never usually talk about this but I read so much misinformation about this, I’m gonna set the record straight. Jesus Christ. There’s a book called ‘The Encyclopaedia Of Heavy Metal’ and it says ‘only an idiot would wear an anti-gay t-shirt to an MTV press conference’. I NEVER WORE NO FUCKING ANTI-GAY T-SHIRT TO AN MTV PRESS CONFERENCE. It’s. Not. True. I wore that shirt once in my life. I came off stage at Ervine Meadows in California, Pantera was opening up for us that night, and I was totally hot and sweating. I come off stage and the guys from LA Guns were backstage, so I say ‘gimme a fuckin’ shirt to put on. Jerry Miller from Metal Edge is there asking for a picture of all of us, so I just pick up this hideous fuckin’ shirt that some fan had thrown up onto stage and put it on. We all knew it was the worst shirt of all time. It wasn’t some campaign that I went on. Metal Edge didn’t cut the other guys out, but then Kurt Loader – who is gay, I don’t think I’m outing him – he got a hold of the picture and put it on MTV as a new piece with Tracii and the guys cut out of the picture. He said, “In the land of homophobia, if Axl Rose owns the restaurant and Public Enemy are the diners, we have a new bus boy on the homophobia wagon…’ It was like I was the anti-Christ. Then Revolver magazine in the States said: ‘the most appalling moments in rock: even though Axl Rose got more press, generally Sebastian Bach behaved worse’. Then they said I wore this t-shirt to a press conference on TV. That’s way different to being back stage with LA Guns all drunk and shit and sticking this hideous t-shirt on. It’s complete bullshit.”

TELL US ABOUT THE TIME YOU GOT ON STAGE WITH MEMBERS OF METALLICA AND GUNS 'N' ROSES IN A ONE-OFF PERFORMANCE AS 'THE GAK'.

“That was RIP magazine’s fourth birthday party. It was Duff McKagan, Axl Rose, Slash, Me, Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield doing ‘Whiplash’. We were all buddies out in LA, and decided to get a band together for RIP’s anniversary, and it’s a legendary bootleg, you can get it on Kazaa.”

TELL US ABOUT BEING ON AND THROWN OFF BROADWAY.

“I was in Jekyll & Hyde, Rocky Horror and Jesus Christ Superstar twice. I just love singing dude.

If you know one thing about me it’s the way that I walk: I have this Sebastian Bach Walk. It’s like ‘hello-oo I’m here motherfucker’, and they were telling me, Jesus definitely wouldn’t walk like that. And I was like, ‘what were you fuckin there?’ The reason that play ended was because I had a contract with the guy who played Judas and we would come out at the end and sing [to the theme tune of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’] nah-nah-naaah, nah-nah-nahh, 2, 3, 4, nah-nah-naaah’ and the whole place would clap along. That was good for the first four months, and by the fifth month the cast starting hating it, and they said ‘look, you shouldn’t get them going like that’, and I was like, ‘you got the wrong fucking guy if you think I will ever with the intention of not getting the crowd going then – well Jesus wouldn’t do that. I’m like ‘How the fuck do you know that Jesus didn’t want people to be having fun’. They kept saying, ‘at the curtain call, you’re not Sebatian, you’re Jesus’. I go, ‘well that’s where you’re fucking wrong, ok’. It was so pretentious. I can take Broadway only so much before I’m like, get me back to rock n’ roll.”

YOU BECAME GOOD FRIENDS WITH RIGHT-WING ROCKER TED NUGENT ON THE SET OF THE VH1 SHOW, ‘SUPERGROUP’, AND YOU’VE SAID THAT HE ENCOURAGED YOU TO STOP DRINKING.

“You know that episode where I said I’d stopped drinking? Well I lied. Ted is so militant in his views. I have to say that living with him for 12 days it’s hard to imagine ever doing truly good in his eyes. He said some stuff online about Dimebag which I thought was really not cool. I’m not going to repeat it, but you can check it out online [Nugent had an unnecessarily offensive and misinformed tirade against Pantera and Dimebag on his official messageboard]. – I’m watching it with all my friends

In the last episode of ‘Supergroup’– and Ted’s playing ‘Strangehold’ which is nine amazing minutes – and we had a fifteen minute set. I’m not going to just go backstage and sit on my ass, so I go grab a load of Damnocracy shirts and start handing them out to the crowd while he’s playing. It’s nine minutes the motherfuckin solo. I’m not making any noise, I’m just throwing free fuckin shirts into the crowd. And in the show Ted says, ‘I dared Sebastian not to fuck with my guitar solo, and for him to throw shirts in the crowd was distracting and highly unprofessional’, and I’m looking at him thinking.

I’m like is it ever good enough for you? I quit drinking, and try so hard to do what you want me to do, but then I go throw shirts in the crowd and that’s unprofessional? Don’t tell me I’m unprofessional when I’ve done four fucking Broadway shows. I always wondered why Ted’s singers didn’t last. Now I know why. Ted wants to be the singer. He is definitely the alpha fuckin male. In a band with Sebastian Bach and Ted Nugent, Ted is the frontman. He brings a fuckin gun onstage with him. We’re going to the show and I’ve got all my leathers on, and he goes, ‘Sebastian, look at my outfit’ and he’s got a fucking loaded gun under his guitar. He gets a lot of hassle from animal rights groups at shows, so Ted is his own bodyguard. And he does a great job of it.”