Buckcherry’s Keith Nelson on giving away your music and playing live
We got a chance to spend a few minutes with Keith Nelson of the LA rock band Buckcherry prior to their performance on the Pain In The Grass – Rockstar Uproar tour stop in Auburn, WA. Buckcherry has been around since 1995, selling millions of albums and playing their asses off on stage everywhere they go. Nelson told us music saved his life on more than one occasion and it gave him chances he’d never had gotten in his small town.
Buckcherry pretty much exploded on the music world with the song “Lit Up”, released in 1999 on their self-titled debut album and they achieved a great deal of success as they watched it climb the charts. The band however seemed to have lost what they found on the debut and the second album fizzled. The band eventually broke up in 2002 and stayed that way for around 3 years before reforming and doing the almost unthinkable. They put out an album called 15 in 2006 that put them back towards the top of the rock world, not an easy feat. Most bands, once they have lost the momentum for any reason, seemingly never get back there again. Here’s what Keith had to say about this tour, U2 and prerecorded music….enjoy!
Keith: The tour’s been really good; a lot of great bands on this tour, and it’s been a great opportunity for us to get out here and promote our new EP, the “F” EP, the Fuck EP, however you wanna spin it. It’s been really good.
NWMS: How’s the response been with the new music?
Keith: It’s been even better than we anticipated. Radio stations are playing “Say Fuck It”, the first single, and it’s been going over really well.
NWMS: You guys fell off the radar screen for a little while, right? And then it seemed like you guys reinvented your career.
Keith: We did more than fall off the radar; we actually broke up for about three years, and then we got back together, and we’ve been going nonstop ever since.
NWMS: How hard is that for a band to do that? Most bands, when they’ve had that big hit, and then when people forget about them; they never get back to where they were.
Keith: It’s nearly impossible, and I think the only reason it actually worked was the perfect storm of what was going on in the music business in the time, what was going on with social media at the time, and the work ethic of the band, Because we weren’t willing to take no for an answer from anyone. We shopped our completed record to all the major labels, and they passed on the record, and so we released it independently, and it went on to sell a million-and-a-half copies. So if it wasn’t for the belief that we had in the band and a lot of fucking hard work, we wouldn’t be talking today.
NWMS: How do you feel about free digital downloads and music piracy and all those issues that have affected music. Do you have an opinion about that?”
Keith: Yeah, I mean, I think music has been devalued in the eyes of the consumer, to the point now where a band like U2 decides to just give its music away and basically tell people that their music isn’t worth anything, it should be treated like something free, and that’s a bummer because I know what it takes to make a record, I know what it takes to write a meaningful record full of songs, and get it into the consumers’ hands, and to me music still has a value, so it’s definitely something that I still struggle with.
NWMS: Suddenly there’s 500 million people in the world that have a new U2 album on their device now that they didn’t have last night; that sounds pretty crazy.
Keith: It is crazy, and I’m sure the band got paid, so they made their money, but they’ve sent a message to everyone that music is free, and that’s disturbing. It’s easy to do that when you’re a multi-millionaire-billionaire and money isn’t really something that you worry about, but when you’re a working rock-and-roll band and you count on every dollar, it’s disappointing to see someone do that. I don’t really like the message that it sends that music is free.
NWMS: There are still tons of killer bands out there grinding away. What would you suggest people do these days to be noticed?
Keith: It’s really hard, you know, I always think it comes back to having great songs and a great live show, and that’s one thing that we’ve tried to do with this band, and that’s one thing that I really believe in. You can download anything for free off the Internet, but the uniqueness of a live show is something that you can’t download, there’s no app for that, you have to be there to see it. So I think you need to make your live show something special; some people do it with pyrotechnics, and some people do it by just being a badass band. We will be one of the few bands that you’ll see today that isn’t relying on some preexisting or prerecorded stuff.
NWMS: As you know, there’s a lot of people that look at it from both sides of the coin.
Keith: I’m not sure what the other side of the coin is. The only side of the coin is……I’m not sure what the other side is.
NWMS: Maybe they think that just because you have that stuff at your disposal, that it’s okay to use it.
Keith: The problem is that most people that rely on that stuff are actually good musicians, so I don’t really understand when they go out there and they have the support of their prerecorded music that, well I just don’t understand it, because most of those bands wouldn’t need it, and to me it’s a farce.
NWMS: Would Buckcherry ever use a prerecorded track on stage?
Keith: FUCK NO, we’d cancel a show before we ever did that.
Keith: I love making music and music has saved my life so many times over.
NWMS: How did it save your life?
Keith: It just inspired me to go beyond the little town that I was in and it inspired me to take chances and to get out of my shell and meet people and be creative. I come from a very working-class town outside of Pittsburgh and there isn’t a lot of people out there pushing you to pursue your dreams, so if I wouldn’t have believed in what was coming out of my speakers when I was a kid, and really bought into it and believed in it, I wouldn’t have pursued it this far. I’d be doing something else.
NWMS: And now you’ve been out here doing this for quite a while, inspiring other guitar players. How does that make you feel?
Keith: That’s very humbling to hear you say that. I would hope that what people take away from the music is that it’s about writing great songs and it’s about being proficient enough in your craft to deliver those songs. I always like to think of what I like to do on my individual instrumental as just a piece of the whole puzzle which makes up a whole rock and roll band. I believe in rock and roll bands, and I still believe in records, and I still believe in playing your music live.