Stix Zadinia - STEEL PANTHER

March 25 2012

Do you wanna look bitchin’ and fuckin’ party? Well, then come with me for15 mn of craziness with STEEL PANTHER drummer Stix Zadinia, really enjoying the sunny weather of this beginning of the afternoon in Paris; With his comrades Lexxi Foxx (Bass), Satchel (Guitar) & Michael Starr (Vocals), they came to support their latest release (and second album) “Balls Out”. Even if you don’t share their sense of humor (all that follows has been said on a serious tone!), or simply don’t like their glam-hard fm tunes, you can’t deny the ambient expectations all around before tonight’s show (ndlr: which will be a real success).

It’s a shame that, because mainly of their looks and lyrics, the musicianship of these guys is not that taken seriously. But when you hear and see Satchel guitar solos, well…let’s say than some well-established guitar heroes could definitely learn things from this guy… Please, fasten your seat-belt, here we go…

Fab: Happy to be in France?
Stix Zadinia (Drums): Well, so far I slept most of the day. So I haven’t seen much but the weather is nice, and your fuckin’ women are really good looking…Sorry, I’m distracted by the women… Anyway, I can’t wait to fuckin’ play tonight. I wish we had some time to go around and see some shit. But you know, when you rock…

Fab: How do you analyze “Balls Out”, now that it’s been out for some time?
Stix Zadinia: I think that “Balls Out” has helped us…penetrate…the markets…(doing obscene gesture)…you know what I mean? And I think that, with “Feel The Steel” (2009), a lot of people were like “I’m not sure what is this” because it was bitching songs. And then “Balls Out” came out, they said “wait a minute, it’s not just one record, it’s two records”. And I think “Balls Out” has helped us fuckin’… I mean, it brought us here! “Feel The Steel” didn’t bring us here, it was the ground floor, but “Balls Out” was like the frosting on the cake of Heavy Metal. If you can imagine baking a Heavy Metal cake, “Feel The Steel” would be the cake parts, and “Balls Out” would be the frosting, be made by a French chef.

Fab: For your first album, we all “felt the steel”, for the second, the “balls were out”, what’s to expect for your third album? Do we have to be afraid??
Stix Zadinia: Yes, you probably should be afraid that your ears won’t be able to comprehend the great music that’s going to be on the third record. It would be our best record because we just keep writing better and better songs, and that’s not to say that “Feel The Steel” doesn’t have phenomenal songs … Actually, I’m really excited about when we do start putting the third record together because, just like yesterday, we were in Zurich, and we were jamming onstage at sound check, and coming up with this riff… I think Lexxi came up with this riff and I just started to play with it, and then Satchel came in…We recorded it and, it’s like, when we get together, shit happens and fuck yeah, I’m getting goose bumps. Seriously, it was killer. So, you probably should be afraid, your brain might explode.

Fab: So you started writing some stuff for the next album?
Stix Zadinia: Yeah, as you know, Satchel writes the majority of the stuff, but it seems like, being on a road, playing together a lot – because when we’re home, we’re partying – doing a lot of jammin’ together. Satchel has a couple of demos, it’s starting to form and it’s really exciting.

Fab: Are you going to have more input into the songwriting?
Stix Zadinia: You know, with Satchel, he’s coming with demos, sometimes with a verse and a chorus, or with a whole entire song, and no matter what, we’ll listen to it, and we’ll take it and everybody will put their own flavor into it. And he’s really cool about letting everybody just throw in their ideas and that what ends up being STEEL PANTHER songs. Everybody in our band is pretty fuckin’ awesome.

Fab: You always talk about sex, but in fact, you’re all big romantic guys, right?
Stix Zadinia: Yeah, we’re softies. You know, we’re romantics. Like, after I get done sweetly making love to a hooker, I like to cuddle. I mean, if I hire a pair of Dutch whores, I’m ok with kissing them on the mouth (ndlr: with a pretended huge sense of pride). You know what, I’m not just one of those guys that’s gonna, you know, fuck and leave…I’ll hang out with you for a couple or minutes! (laughter). Not you (ndlr: pointing at me)…but if you’re a hooker, a chick…and a vagina…

Fab: Yeah, it helps sometimes…(laughter).
Stix Zadinia: Yeah (general laughter), it definitely helps when there’s a vagina involved…

Fab: What is your musical background? I mean, not your influences, but how you’ve learned drums.
Stix Zadinia: Actually, my dad…when I was in third grade, I went over to a friend’s house, and he has a drumset. I played it and I was like “what the fuck are these things ??”. I remembered hitting it and loving it. And I went home, I tell my mom and my dad “I wanna play drums! I gotta play drums!”. And they were not happy because it’s a loud instrument, and when your kid wants to play an instrument that you don’t like, you think that’s it’s gonna be a fad, that he’s gonna play for a month and move on…It is how it started.

It was not hearing a drummer, but playing on an actual drumset when I was in third grade. My pop gave me drum lessons and then I listened to LED ZEPPELIN, IRON MAIDEN, BLACK SABBATH, DIO, JUDAS PRIEST… That’s the shit, right there. It is great music. That’s one thing we do, we sing about pussy, about fuck, about drugs, about partying, but…we do it with bitchin’ music! And that’s the all thing. People are not coming just because they wanna hear a song about pussy, but because the music is good, we try to keep it rockin’.

Fab: You still possess the highest groupie count?
Stix Zadinia: I do, yeah. And it’s not for any other reason that my standards are very low. I don’t really give a fuck. If she’s willing, I’m down (laughter).

Fab: “17 girls in a row”…what’s your secret? Not too much cramps?
Stix Zadinia: Viagra, Viagra. And you have to pace yourself. You know, if you’re 21…it’s like a soccer game. Van Persie (ndlr: Arsenal player) doesn’t go out and fuckin’ run as fast as he can for the first ten minutes; he runs and catches his breath. If you’re 21 or 25, and you try to fuck seventeen girls in a row, you won’t do it, because you’re gonna try to fuck like a rabbit, and you can’t do that. To go the distance, you gotta use your brain, and your physical.

Fab: Does Tiger Woods know about the song you made about him? Did you meet him in person?
Stix Zadinia: You know what? I have not met Tiger Woods, and I believe he does know about it because I have a friend who’s a pro golfer. His name is Jason Gore…(turning to the camera) “What’s up Jason!”, and he grew up with Tiger Woods, so… And there’s also another dude named Pat Perez, who’s on the PGA tour, who’s a very good friend of Tiger, and I know Pat is a huge fan of STEEL PANTHER, so…I think they’re putting a copy of the song in his locker (laughter). I wanna see the video of him listening to it. It’s gonna be fuckin’ awesome.

Fab: How do you manage walking on the thin line between seriousness and fun?
Stix Zadinia: I don’t know. We take our rockin’ very seriously, because we love to rock. We’re music fans, and we wanna make sure that we’re fuckin’ deliver our songs the best that they can be delivered, for the people that fuckin’ buy tickets and come to our shows. It’s shitty when you go to a show and the band sucks. You feel ripped off. It’s the last thing that we wanna do because our fans, they’re the whole reason why we got to do the things we do.

Fab: How do you convince Chad Kroeger (NICKELBACK) to sing on a song entitled “It Won’t Suck Itself”?
Stix Zadinia: It wasn’t us having to convince him. We didn’t had to fuckin’ convince him. We went to his house in Vancouver, spent the whole day smoking weed and writing…

Fab: Is it true that the name of the song was his idea?
Stix Zadinia: Yeah. The only thing that we had: he goes “I have an idea for a song, here’s the title:…” (laughter). And we went “fuck yeah!”. There was no music, no riffs, it was not “I have this idea, but I don’t want to use it for NICKELBACK”, it was like: “This is the title that I have in my mind”, and Satchel bust out this crazy riff. And we recorded, like a demo version…he had his engineer because he’s got a studio in his house, and we worked on the lyrics altogether. We came home to L.A., we arranged it STEEL PANTHER’s style, we made it the way we wanted to make it, as far as arrangement wise, sent it up to him, he dug it, he sang on the parts we wanted, and that was it! It was a really fun experience. You known, Chad’s a cool motherfucker. Can I say motherfucker?
Fab: Yeah.
Stix Zadinia: (very close to the mike) Chad’s a cool motherfucker!

Fab: Happy to be at the next HELLFEST?
Stix Zadinia: Yeah, and you know why? We were in Australia (ndlr: Soundwave Festival) and I kept seeing… you know, there were a bunch of bands, SLIPKNOT, SYSTEM OF A DOWN, LIMP BIZKIT, MARYLIN MANSON, all these bands, right? And everybody on the crew are wearing HELLFEST jackets! It was like we were at fuckin’ HELLFEST! But we’ve never been (to HELLFEST), so dude, it must be a killer festival. So, because I saw everybody supporting that fest, and now that I know we’re gonna play at it, I’m fuckin’ excited! We’re gonna be awesome.

Fab: Any anecdotes from your show in Wembley with MOTLEY CRUE and DEF LEPPARD? Is it one of STEEL PANTHER highlight?
Stix Zadinia: Oh, it was (definitely) a highlight. It was absolutely one of our… I mean, STEEL PANTHER, MOTLEY CRUE & DEF LEPPARD? To be able to tour with those guys was fuckin’ awesome. We hang out with the guys from DEF LEPPARD a lot, and each and every one of those guys are as cool as you would hope that they would be. Not one of them has an assistant. They’re all just regular cool motherfuckers. The whole experience was great. It was great for us because it was like been accepted by a legendary band like DEF LEPPARD.

Fab: Do we have to hate Grunge for what it did to glam rock and hard FM rock? Especially with the fact that it does not really exist anymore…
Stix Zadinia: No, you don’t have to hate Grunge. You have to hate Heavy Metal at that time for getting stupid. Because if Heavy Metal was awesome at that time, Grunge wouldn’t have killed it. It’d be like getting mad at a superhero for getting killed by a villain, but the superhero just started to getting fat and not even thinking about being cool. It became silly, and we’re not silly. We rock!

Fab: We have all to look bitchin’, right? And party ?
Stix Zadinia: That’s really the whole thing.

Fab: Favorite song to play live and why?
Stix Zadinia: “Seventeen girls in a row” because every night I watch the audience bouncing, and it looks fuckin’ good!

Fab: A last word for your female French fans?
Stix Zadinia: Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? Ce soir!