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Sunday, December 05, 2004 - 06:47 PM
Cincinnati guitar legend Rob Fetters follows road to tell us what it’s like now
By Greg Matusak
Few people can claim to have made their mark on the Cincinnati music scene as large as Rob Fetters. Rob is a founding member of three of the most pivotal local band ever.
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In 1983, Rob and his band, The Raisins, made an incredible debut release with their self-titled record. When the single “Fear is Never Boring” caught the attention of radio, the legend was born. Two years later, Guitarist Adrian Belew and drummer Chris Arduser reformed the group into The Bears. The Bears toured steadily for the next couple of years, always receiving critical success.
With Adrian Belew’s departure in 1990, the remaining Bears-Rob Fetters, Bob Nyswonger, and Chris Arduser, again reform, but this time into a three piece group they would call The Psychodots.
After three studio albums with The Psychodots, in 1998 Rob releases his first solo project, “Lefty Loose, Righty Tight”. That year, the Bears were inducted into the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards (CEA's) Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Bear’s would release a new album and tour in 2001.
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The Psychodots still perform to a large fan base here in Cincinnati and beyond--The Psychodots’ website is maintained by a fan who lives in Chicago and The Bears website is maintained by a fan who lives in Georgia--and their music has had impact on the Cincinnati original music community.
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At 50 years old, Rob Fetters has found himself in a place where few musicians of his era claim to be: happy. He is married with a family, still performs and records when he wants and is constantly surrounded by music of his own making.
His last solo album, “Lefty Loose, Righty Tight,” was released in 1998. Though there hasn’t been a follow up, he has not put down music; not by any means. During the day, Rob works at Sound Image Studios in downtown Cincinnati, where QCF magazine got to speak to the Cincy Rock Hall-of-Famer.
What is life like today?
I work on demand for this company (Sound Images), I get deadlines and I have to come up with music for different projects. A lot of people think it’s all jingles. I do some jingles, but the lion share of my work usually is instrumental is called post-scoring, where I do music that goes along with commercials. And It’s really a great job and I do music that-- although I grew up playing in a rock band, I’m a rock ‘n roll guitar player--in this job I get to pretend that I have classical training or that I’m avant-garde or I’m in a jazz band in the 1920’s. Whatever the creative director wants, I come up with.
So as far as recording production and technology, the art of music production, I have a blast just trying out different recording techniques because sometimes I’ll be doing something that sounds like Motown in the ‘6os and the best way to sound like Motown in the ’60 is to record that way. The same way if somebody says “we want you to do Smashmouth song with different lyrics for an ABC commercial, then I’d need to use late 90’s recording technology. I use loops and things like that along with guitar. So the palate of sounds I have here is practically unlimited which can get me into trouble. And recording technique is fairly unlimited and so the only limitation is in my head.
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How do you separate the songs that you write between the bands that you play in and your own solo projects?
I am maybe the only person in the band who looks at it this way, I actually do have a tier system. I think we all do. For me, my favorite band to play in is The Bears because in The Bears we have everything covered, You can have killer vocals, interesting, neat guitar stuff up the wazoo, a rhythm section as good as any rhythm section that I have heard so far. I’m not bragging. I’m really glad to be allowed to be in this band with these great people and I think if you put us all together, we really, really can become unfocused, we focus on The Bears. We want good guitar-pop song that we can play live as well.
What we really want to do in The Bears is record quickly. Write a song, learn it, and get it on the first few takes because they sound better that way. And we’ve gotten really good working that way. It’s a trusting environment …The Bears especially save me all the time from doing something embarrassing. Like I might want to add too many vocal parts and Adrian will just get this look on his face: “Sounds like The Association,” and he’s right! So we’re focused in that band.
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Psychodots for me was really a songwriter’s workshop. Because we tried to play anything anybody brought in. I might not be really enamored with a song or can’t hear what Chris or Bob might want, but we try to play it anyway and bless them, they try to play anything I bring in. And it would stand or fall, but at least we would give it a go.
Then in my solo stuff, that’s where not necessarily bad songs, but songs that slip through the cracks. One. Never played this live, never pull it off, too many drum loops or maybe I’m thinking cellos or something like that, or it’s just too soft and acoustic. Or maybe the lyric in is just too aggressively scathingly critical of something, which I do from time to time. But usually I always write a song I like or don’t finish it or I get a point where I’m really happy with it and I try to run them past the bands. I value all of their opinions. And they, without being cruel to me, will say “that’s really corny,” or “that’s really good” or “that’s really beautiful.” Sometimes they say “that’s so beautiful that you should put it on your solo record because it’s done; we won’t add anything to it.” Then I really start fighting “Yes, yes, but please play this song” and sometime I win that.
There was an album of children’s music released by the State of Ohio with the Bears’ cover of “Comin’ Round the Mountain”. How did that come about?
An old friend of ours, Stan Hertsman, somehow was tapped by some government official (who) wanted to put together a CD with parenting tips, because I don’t know if you know this or not but when you get children they don’t come with an instruction book. So the idea came that if you put music on it would be cool, because kids would listen to and parents would listen to it and then between the songs there would be little parenting tips. So somebody thought, let’s just use Ohio musicians and Stan just called a bunch of people up and got a very eclectic mix; The guy from Wild Cherry contributed, members of Jefferson Airplane, Over the Rhine had a fantastic song that you can download from their website called “The Poop Smith Song” that was recorded here at Sound Images: Brilliant. Really good, but for some reason some tight ass in Columbus put the nix on that.
You have Children of your own now, would you ever encourage or discourage them getting involved professionally with music?
I would absolutely encourage my kids to play. As far as the music business goes, it is, as everybody knows a heartbreaking business. But the more I find out about business in general, I find it is all like that. I think there are so many ways to gain satisfaction in music. If you’re not going to be satisfied unless you’re rich and famous from what you’re doing, I don’t know. How else do you get rich and famous? If that’s what you want to give yourself worth--that’s a whole other deal, but as far the satisfaction of playing music and creating it, there’s nothing like it.
My oldest son is 13 (and) plays guitar, he’s very good and he’s just like me, just like anybody else I know. He’s got a huge CD collection. He listens to it and it is his world. I really don’t push him. I never said, ”practice, practice, practice.” When he’s asked me how to do things then I might say “well here’s how you do it and you’ve got to do it probably 200 times to get it right.” The only area where I’ve been a little rough on him in is playing in tune. I really insisted that he plays in tune. I have another son who plays drums and the only way that I’ve been rough on him is by saying “you’ve got to keep time.” I don’t care how hard you hit them. I don’t care what you play. But if it’s 120 beats per minute and you are supposed to keep the groove, don’t slow down and don’t speed up. And my little girl plays keyboards. My wife plays organ in the church. So it is a music family, but there is no regimentation and if they want to give it up at any time, I would let them.
I used to think, “this is a terrible world, I don’t want kids.” Then we started having kids and I realized, “Gee, this is what makes it a beautiful world – this is fantastic!” With music it’s kinda’ the same thing. Sam (Fetters’ son) wants to play the guitar, “Oh no, because I know what he’s in for.” It’s not like the world needs another rock band, we could use a cure for breast cancer, but I don’t know if we really need another hot guitar player. But he really enjoys it and that’s where the fun is and you get to learn a lot about yourself playing a musical instrument.
Besides composing and performing, you also produce music for other bands in Cincinnati?
I haven’t done a ton. I don’t actively seek out doing it a lot. It’s a lot of work. Especially on the local level, it’s a lot of work, for maybe zero or little money. But I’ve done some that I’ve like a lot. The recent one that I’ve done that I’m worried that people are not going to hear, because to me, this music is truly alternative: the music of Nigerian musician Baoku Moses. I produced the disc here with him. I used Cincinnati musicians. The disc is great. It’s very political. It’s political about the situation in Nigeria now there is a beautiful community of Nigerians living in Cincinnati and there is a cultural scene that nobody knows about. It’s so far out of the main stream. It was exciting to work on this record; I learned so much about a music form that I love hearing.
You have a new Bears album and a new solo album in the works. When will they be out?
I have no idea (laughs). The Bears record in January we’ll finish recording and mixing and we’ll probably put it out ourselves because we’ve discovered we make more money that way. We’ll probably (follow up) like last time with a small tour, which we like to do and then do another one. The Bears have no time schedule. We all have day jobs. So, The Bears are purely a focused adventure for the four of us to do. We all love it. We vowed to each other in the van going coast to coast “God if only we could do this all the time,” but I think that if we could do it all the time it wouldn’t be so much fun. And if it gets too big then all these other people get on board then and the boat capsizes, cause we’ve experience this before. It’s fun that we have all the control over it, it’s fantastic. It’s really a neat thing.
The other album?
The other album I’m working on my solo record and I will be finished recording and mixing it December 1st. I’m not really sure how I’m going to put it out. I could put it myself again and make more money by selling less, which is probably a smart thing to do. A couple of distributors harangue me fairly consistently about getting on their stable of “has-been-wannabe” performers and I don’t know if I want to do it. I don’t really care about being hugely successful. What I really like is just doing the music. I have no idea if people will like this new disc or not. I know I do. I’ve played it for a few people that said it was really cool. But it’s different from my first solo record
In what way?
My first solo record dealt with failure in a lot of ways, things not turning out the way I planned. And I know that in business you’re suppose to say that everything is great, and that record is full of a lot of songs basically saying “This ain’t working.” I always find a little humor in it. There is enlightenment in it that comes from that. So that record was kind of spiritual and reality based. I have no idea if people picked that up. But there were songs on it like “Try,” Has been wanna be never was never gonna be/ That’s the way she sees me/ Like everyone else in town. When I wrote that song, that was me, I was exactly that person, It’s funny, because right at that time same time, I was giving up in defeat, I started getting awards for best song writer, Cammys and The Bears got the Hall of Fame in CityBeat. Right in this 18 month period. As soon as I completely, utterly said “***** this – I just want to play my guitar, make music and record in my house, I’m fine this way.” And that’s not the way I used to feel. I used to desperately want to be a rock star. Desperately working my butt off and starving and I mean that kind of literally. I was living off 8 ounces of cheese a day and a six-pack of beer.
This record is—lyrically, is a lot more oriented toward observing. I’m middle age now. I’ve seen a lot of marriages dissolve. A lot of things that looked so good 15 years ago for people just fall part. My life has not fallen apart. I’m lucky. But a lot of people that I know and love really well have just been blindsided, by things that happened. So that gave me a lot of inspiration to write about. At times some of these songs just sprang out of me out of frustration of wanted to save somebody from the fires that I couldn’t. Some painful reality that way. And there are some funny songs. There’s a song called “Trailer Park Bob” About a mythical person who likes the MC5 and Herman Melville; actually he’s a lot like me, except he’s living in an Airstream in Yuma. And he wouldn’t trade what he’s got for anything.
Links
· Music.com – The Bears
· Cincinnati Enquirer – “The Bears prove they’re still local Fab Four”
· Wild Cherry
· Jefferson Airplane official band homepage
· Over the Rhine official band homepage
· CityBeat – “Baoku Moses: Drumming Up Heritage”
· CityBeat – “Moses Releases Debut CD” (Psycodots, Bears)
Contact Information
· gregm@queencityforum.com
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