Musicpix.net

Buckcherry and lead singer Josh Todd are back, and they're back with a vengeance. After their debut album in 1999 that contained the hit single "Lit Up," they disbanded shortly after their sophomore effort in 2002. Todd and Buckcherry co-founder Keith Nelson then dabbled in ex Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash's "The Project" which later evolved into Velvet Revolver. Stoked with a burning desire to get back to what they loved, Todd and Nelson refueled Buckcherry and dropped their third album "15" which contains their highest charting hit to date "Crazy Bitch."

Musicpix.net was pleased to have the opportunity to talk with Josh Todd about Buckcherry's Phoenix-like rise from the ashes to near the top of the charts, their rock and roll roots, and a few stories about his latest tattoos. Read on...

MusicPix: You’re a straight up rock & roll band.  With the myriad of all the genres that are out there… the grunge, the punk, the emo, or whatever seems to be the genre of the hour, it’s got to make you feel pretty good to that you’ve had success playing straight up rock & roll vs. trying to follow a certain trend…

Josh:  That’s kind of been our motto.  We just broke it down like this:  We just wanted to make music that made us happy.  We didn’t really care about what was going to come of it.  To be great at what we did and be fulfilled as musicians and the rest would come if it was great.  And it did.  We’re really grateful and happy about the second shot that we got because nobody really wanted to have anything to do with us.  We really had to fight our way back into the game and everything has worked out.

MusicPix: You’re music is really raw…and more of a classic rock style.  You don’t appear to have any restrictions…either self-imposed or imposed by your label…you’re pretty much without boundaries.  How important is it for your group to be “real” as an artist?

Josh:  That’s what makes Buckcherry unique.  We don’t have any formula or guidelines.  We say what we want to say and sometimes, it works against us.  But most of the time, we get a great response.  “Crazy Bitch” has surpassed our biggest single “Lit Up” and that’s something that I wanted to achieve.  And who would have thunk that a song like that would be all over radio.  It’s the same thing with “Lit Up.”  We didn’t expect that and it was the fans that dictated that.

Buckcherry Ft.Wayne Live Photos

MusicPix:  “Crazy Bitch” pretty much has the making of one those classic rock songs that will be played for generations.  When you wrote it, did you think that it would have such a chance and such success? And does the success of a song like that put additional pressure on you as an artist?

Josh: You know what?  It’s funny…hits are really hard to come by…big ones.  The funny thing is when you’re writing them, they come together so quickly.  We wrote that song so long ago and we wrote it after our second tour.  Three of the guys had already quit and it was just Keith and I…writing songs for the third record.  We hadn’t been dropped from DreamWorks at that point in time.  “Crazy Bitch” was one of those songs.  I was driving around LA in my car and came up with the chorus and I called Keith right away.  I just wanted to sing it to his voice mail so that I wouldn’t forget it and he answered the phone.  I told him what I wanted it to be and he matched the image in my head perfectly and rarely does that happen.  It just came together really quickly.  It was the only song that we took.  We wrote thirty songs during that period and it was the only song that we put on the record.  If I worried about whether or not I would ever write a song that was going to be big on the radio, it would drive me nuts.  I can’t worry about that stuff.  I focus on making a great record as a whole from beginning to end.  That’s what we all focus on as a band.

MusicPix:  Have there been unexpected realities in the music industry for you that “Crazy Bitch” has brought to you?

Josh:  This is the unexpected reality…you don’t make as much money as you think you’re going to make!  That’s the unexpected reality.  People see you on MTV or hear your music on the radio and they think that you’re rollin’ in limos and making a million dollars…it takes a long time to make good money in this business.  Especially now, it’s really hard to sell records.  Having a gold record is a big deal again because the way everybody is receiving information…it’s so wide open.  It’s really a lot harder to sell records… especially rock records.  But rock records are making a come back.  The market is up…above hip/hop.

MusicPix:  Going back…you got started in 1995 and took a breather and then in 2002, you came back with vengeance.  What was the emphasis behind resurrecting Buckcherry?

Josh:  Well we never wanted the thing that happened to Buckcherry to happen.  It was very disappointing to me and Keith.  I’m a very competitive guy and I felt like I got beat by the system.  That transition…going from completely broke and bandless and just coming off all that.  Keith and I were working day jobs and it had come full circle.  It was very humbling.  In retrospect, I’m grateful for it now but it was difficult.  Buckcherry made us happy and we had lost that.  First, we just started rekindling our friendship because we have a lot in common.  But when we actually got started again, we just wanted to be happy.  It wasn’t like a situation where it was a great group of guys.  Then we found three guys that had been through the same hard knocks as us in the music business and that were great players and loved Buckcherry.  We only auditioned three guys and that’s the band.  We’re having the best time.  It’s like the lineup that we’ve always wanted.  We’ve been touring thirteen months and we still like being around each other.

MusicPix:  The first time we saw you at X-fest in Indy and your performance and the crowd response was extraordinary.  If I recall, you headlined the second stage and there were probably 15,000 people around that stage.

Josh:  That was a FUN show…I remember that.  We had a great summer.  We had an extraordinary year last year.  It was amazing and we’re going to be touring into the fall this year so…it’s going to be a lot of fun.

MusicPix:  How does it make you feel when you get in front of an enthusiastic crowd that’s hanging on your every word and every move knowing what you’ve had to go through personally and as a band to even exist?

Josh:  I’ll tell you exactly how it feels for me.  I’m overwhelmed with joy.  I feel fantastic.  Sometimes I have these outer body experiences…not to get too deep on ya but sometimes when I’m at a show, when the energy is right and the people are going crazy, I’ll see one person singing the lyrics to a particular section of a song or something and everything goes into slow motion.  It’s bizarre.  I think WOW…they are screaming at the top of their lungs like I did when I was fuckin’ 14 going to punk rock shows.  When I see that, it just touches me in such a way knowing that we wrote original music and that music is apart of their life and that’s pretty extraordinary.  We don’t ever take that for granted.  Before we do shows, we make sure that the show is the number one priority of the day.  Nothing happens until the show is finished and we can relax.

MusicPix: You mentioned being 15 being back in California.  Let’s flashback and you’re 15 years old again and you’re checking out the babes on Beach Blvd…

Josh:   My first concert, well it wasn’t really a concert it was a club show.  I saw the Ramones at Fender’s at Long Beach.

MusicPix:  That’s a pretty good first show to see…

Josh:   Long Beach, California…I’d never been in a pit before.  I had on low-top Van’s tennis shoes and I was in this pit and it was so chaotic.  On the first song, I lost my shoe and people were just pulverizing my foot and I had to get out of there.  I was like, “Fuck, that was amazing…”  I just sat back on the back wall because I had no shoe and couldn’t go back in.  Then this big, fat skinhead came up to me.  I thought he was going to kick my ass or something but he sat down next to me and he lit up a joint and handed it to me.  He didn’t say a word and I smoked my first joint with a big fuckin’ skinhead and I went to my first rock show and I said, ‘this is fucking amazing…I want to do this the rest of my life.’

MusicPix:  So were you into the Orange County puck scene then?

Josh:  Fuck yeah.  I was into bands like DI and there was a band called Doggy Style from there.  I was into all kind of punk bands like Seven Seconds and Black Flag, Minor Threat, Sub-Humans, and the Toy Dolls.

MusicPix:  We cover a lot of bands and I’ve got to say in the 400 plus bands that we’ve covered in the last couple of years, you have the best tattoos of any artist out there.  Since they are apart of the visible you, do you have any stories behind any of them?  Two in particular that caught my eye is the LA Dodgers logo with the flames and I found it ironic that your Chaos has the Anaheim Angels logo…very similar in the A…

Josh:  That’s like the newest tattoo I have so I’d really like to talk about that…It’s really a symbol not like me being a crazy baseball fan.  I was born in LA, I grew in Orange County, I’m a California native and LA is my stomping grounds.  I conquered that city.  It’s where both my daughters where born so it means a lot to me.  That LA symbol was like a stamp for me so I wanted that tattoo.  If you look on the LA, the whole city is behind it and the capital building right there and then they’re flames around the city.  I was there during the Rodney King riots and stuff.  I used to trip on acid and be on top of apartment buildings, watching the whole fucking city burn.  It was heavy.  That’s pretty much what it symbolized to me.  It’s my city and baby’s name is above that.  I love that.

Buckcherry X-Fest Photos

MusicPix:  A lot of celebrity’s personas don’t mirror what they are like in really life.  They’re stage presence isn’t normally what they’re about.  Is there a side of you that you believe that should be known or misconceptions out there that you’d like to clarify?

Josh:  Unless you ask me specially…  I’m not out there getting blood transfusions and riding in limos and screwing prostitutes.  That’s not the reality of my life.  I’m a pretty stable guy.

MusicPix:  It’s always fun to do “research” on artists before an interview and one of the things that caught my eye is the classification of your music as ‘sleaze rock.’  I can’t imagine that…sleaze is sleaze.  You can be raw and discuss things that you might probably discuss with your grandmother necessarily at Thanksgiving, but that doesn’t make you a sleaze.

Josh:  I completely agree.  We get that ‘sleaze rock’ and it’s silly to me.  Buckcherry is deeper than that.  But I can see how people might stamp us that by just hearing one song like “Cocaine” or “Crazy Both.”  It’s unfortunate that some people like that don’t get to fully grasp what’s going on here.  I think it’s silly.  It’s basically because we say what we want to say and maybe what other people are thinking and  they just think that’s what we’re about…I don’t know what they think!  That’s all we’re just doing drugs and fucking chicks?  I have a family. I’m not a young man anymore. I’m 35 years old and this is my third record.  If I was doing a mountain of cocaine every night, I wouldn't have lasted two months.

MusicPix:   I understand that you were involved in a project that ended up being Velvet Revolver.  To me, you might consider that a blessing in disguise that that fell through because it allowed you to point your face squarely at Buckcherry again?

Josh:  Even when I was doing it…it was a great experience and it was a lot of fun.  But when Keith and I were involved in it, we just thought this is Buckcherry with better musicians.  That’s all I ever felt in my heart.  Although I thought to myself, “I was jamming with the guys and G& R (Guns ‘n Roses) this is nuts”.  I love G & R when I was coming up.  I’m very passionate about Buckcherry in retrospect and it all happened for the right reasons.  They’ve had their own success as well. 

MusicPix:  Where do you draw your inspiration from…your experiences, or is it fiction a combination of both?

Josh:  It’s everything.   I read a lot of books.  I pay attention to people and what they’re doing.  I travel a lot to gigs and pay attention and writing stuff then coming up with hooks and piece it all together.  Sometimes, I’ll just hear a piece of music and it will spark some kind of memory and I’ll write about that.  When I heard “Lit Up,” we were in the rehearsal room and I just started singing the melody.  I thought about the first time I did blow when I was 16 and how exciting it was.  It just sounded like a party song to me and we wrote that song in five minutes.  “Broken Glass” is about a couple of books, “The Art of War” and “The Bay of Pigs” that I wrote in third person.  I put myself in a soldier’s shoes and tried to write from their shoes.  There’s a lot of intensity in the third person.

MusicPix:  Life on the road is tough and demanding and fans don’t realize the sacrifices that a recording artist goes through…

Josh:  They have no idea.  No idea the kind of work that goes into this…

MusicPix:  Do you have any regrets?  At times, would you rather be doing something else?

Josh:  No, this is the only thing that I’ve found in life that I’m passionate about.  It’s always fulfilling for me and that’s very hard to find.  I still love writing songs and I love to perform.  I’m getting sick of the traveling but it’s apart of this game.  I accept it and I do it with joy and love.

MusicPix:  I believe it shows on stage and you’ve had some other artistic dabbling in your background like acting.  Do you have any aspirations to pursue more of that?

Josh:  I just like to be challenged.  It was something that happened without any effort the first time I did a movie, “The Salt and Sea.”  I wasn’t even looking to do a movie; it just fell in my lap.  I did it and had a really good time.  It was challenging and a good creative experience so whenever I have time, I'd pursue that but music has always been number one. 

MusicPix:  You guys have gone through the school of hard knocks.  How does it make you feel when you see an artist, and this isn’t meant to be a slam on Paris Hilton, but when you see someone like that get huge media attention because of who she is?

Josh:  There are a lot of people that don’t have a lot of talent that become ridiculously famous.  When I was younger and didn’t have so open of a mind as I do now, I would resent them and have a hard time with it.  Now, I look at it totally differently.  Why are these people succeeding?  Because they have an incredible drive to be successful or to be famous.  That’s pretty extraordinary to me because to not have that much talent and to get up in front of the whole world, takes a ridiculous amount of drive.  Madonna was that way.  She wasn’t the best vocalist ever but she had vision and drive and she knew what she wanted to do.  You have to respect somebody for that.  I’m just trying to have an open mind because I just want to understand everything for what it is.

MusicPix:  Any new songs?  “15” is pretty fresh as it was just released last April.  Are you writing … "15 + 1?"

Josh: Yeah, we’re just piecing things together…then we’ll get into a room together.  We work very fast…we work really hard when it comes down to the writing process.  I’m trying to enjoy the road.  I try to not look too far ahead.  I did that in the past and I wasn’t fulfilled.  On my first record, I was thinking about what I was going to do next and was in the ‘got to out-do this one’ mentality and I was never in the moment.  I didn’t establish great relationships.  I was introverted and stayed in the hotel.  I didn’t interact with anybody and it wasn’t good for me.  The second record kind of reflected that now that I look back on it.  It was too rushed and it shouldn’t have been.  I’m not going to do that anymore.  I’m just going to think about ideas.  I have a digital recorder and get ideas down but right now, we’re touring and I want to enjoy touring.

MusicPix: Say you had a crystal ball to create a perfect world for Buckcherry and the way you’d like the world to be.  What would your perfect world be?

Josh:  Wow…that’s a big one.  If the world didn’t have conflict and challenges, it wouldn’t be exciting.  I think the world is fine the way it is.  I do wish that everybody had opportunities that Americans have.  That would be the perfect world.  If everybody had the opportunities that Americans had…in every place, every continent on the globe, and we were all free to express ourselves with education and technology available, I think it would be amazing.

Josh Todd-Vocals
Keith Nelson-Gutar
Stevie D-Guitar
Jimmy Ashhurst-Bass
Xavier Muriel-Drums
 
Discography:  Buckcherry

1999  Buckcherry 
2001  Time Bomb 
2002  Time Bomb (Japan Bonus Track) 
2006  15 

The Tour:  Buckcherry
 
  1.21.07 Cincinnati, OH Bogart's
1.23.07 Libertyville, IL Austin’s Saloon
1.24.07 Springfield, MO Oasis
1.26.07 Little Rock, AR Clear Channel Metroplex
1.27.07 Dallas, TX Palladium Ballroom
1.28.07 Corpus Christi, TX The Pavilion @ Concrete Street 
1.30.07 College Station, TX Hurricane Harry's
2.1.07 Oklahoma City, OK Bricktown Events Center
2.2.07 Amarillo, TX - KZRK Aztec Music Hall
2.3.07 Lubbock, TX - KFMX The Pavilion
2.5.07 Denver, CO Ogden Theatre
2.7.07 Blackfoot, ID - KCVI El Rey Events Center
2.8.07 Salt Lake City, Utah The Great Salt Air
2.13.07 Vancouver, British Columbia Plush
2.15.07 Grand Praire, ALB The Corral
2.16.07 Ft. McMurray, ALB Cowboys
2.17.07 Lloydminister, ALB The Kooler
2.19.07 Calgary, ALB Cowboys
2.20.07 Edmonton,ALB Edmonton Events Center
2.22.07 Regina, Saskatchewan Turvey Center
2.23.07 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Odeon
2.25.07 Winnipeg, Manitoba Burton Cummings Theatre
03.30.07 Phoenix AZ Cardinal Stadium