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At the end of each decade in the rock and roll era there has always seemed to be a band that was able to sum up the previous ten years of musical output. The sixties had the STONES, the seventies CHEAP TRICK the eighties GUNS AND ROSES and the nineties will have GLIMMER. What GLIMMER adds to the formula is also what makes all the difference. GLIMMER's blending of pop-rock and gut-punch guitar far outshines anything Seattle, or anywhere else for that matter, ever produced but maintains every ounce of its dark emotional draw. Pop? Yes, but not shallow. Political? No, but not unconscious. The beauty of it all is that the group makes no effort to separate any of its many parts, it all comes together organically and beautifully. Take the lead track "Velveteen" from the group's debut, "THE SILVER ZONE" for instance, it is two and a half minutes of pure adrenalized passion and warfare with enough tenderness to make it almost sweet, almost, but not quite. GLIMMER is not a band without history. Guy Griffin was a member of THE LONDON QUIREBOYS, a band that inexplicably never quite happened in America, something that Griffin is perfectly content with as now he doesn't have to sweat the constant comparisons as he would have in his native England where THE QUIREBOYS had a fistful of hits. There are shades of THE QUIREBOYS in GLIMMER's collective shine but no more so than any of the group's many influences. Again, GLIMMER is its own creation and supercedes all of its influences to the point where it can justifiably be called "original," if such a thing is truly possible in rock and roll anymore. Griffin will be taking GLIMMER (Griffin on Vocals/guitar, Martin Henderson on drums, Luke Bossendorfer on guitar, Gary Ivin on Bass) out on the road, playing where and when he is wanted. With any luck, and perhaps a bit of radio programming taste, that will be nationwide. I phoned Griffin up at his home recently and spoke with him about how he intends to turn all that glimmers into gold.
DAVID LEE Your publicist said that I would be catching you just before you were off to work so, the first question is, where do you work when you are not rocking and rolling? GUY GRIFFIN No comment!(laughs) I am just waiting until we go out on tour actually. I just work at a friends clothing company and do, kinda, rock and roll clothing. DL So, the band never has to worry about wardrobe then? GG Yeah! You get bits and pieces but some of it is a little bit too out there for us. DL Have you gone conservative on us now? GG (Laughing) No, no we just know what looks good on us and what doesn't. Some of the stuff that they make is just a little too much, like the stuff that MARYLYN MANSON would wear, it's not my style. DL No spandex or mascara? GG No! DL Well, you mentioned in the first sentence that there would be a tour so let us start there. GG Yeah, we are looking at trying to book some dates right now. We will probably be starting off around Texas and sort of heading up towards New York, basically where we are getting the most radio play. Then, hopefully, we can get some kind of support slot. I would like to get out with a band that can fill big clubs and small theatres, that would be good for us. DL Listening to the record it is obvious that you are all very steeped in traditional rock and roll so who would you see as being a band that would be compatible to your style? GG I don't know. I think that we could play with a lot of different types of bands, really. Even a band like STONE TEMPLE PILOTS would have been good but I guess that they are not going out now. DL Not for a year, at least(laughs). GG It doesn't look like it. That kind of band would be good or bands like BUSH or OASIS or FOO FIGHTERS, there are a lot of bands that we could go out with. I don't think that we could do well if we were out there supporting KORN or something like that.(laughs) DL You are living in LA now? GG DL But you actually put together this band when you went back to England, isn't that how it went? GG Yeah, kind of. I met the drummer, Martin, out here and we had sort of been playing together for about two and a half years and we were playing as a three piece. We had a revolving door of bass players, we kept going through them and we couldn't really stabilize the lineup and then we had a couple of deals that, basically, fell through. After the second one fell through we were pretty much pissed off about the whole thing and the whole music biz scene in LA so it was like, "Oh, forget this and lets go back to England." We did that and that was in '97 and that is when we got Luke in the band. He was a dear friend of my younger brother and I have known him since school. He had his own thing going with another band playing guitar and singing and we said that we needed a bass player and he decided to switch and then we got a call from some people that had been into my stuff for a while who also had a production company. They told us that they would pay for us to come out here and they said "You can forget about making demos and all of that, you can just make a record and we will package it try and get a deal with the finished product." We flew out here and made the record with a producer that I have known for a few years, Jim Wirt (RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS). We went into the studio for fourteen days straight and did the whole record and then after the record was done it was pretty obvious that we were going to have to expand the lineup to a two-guitar lineup so Luke moved back onto guitar. We got this friend of ours, Gary Ivin, in on bass and that was it. And that is how GLIMMER was born. DL Is Gary English or American? GG Yeah, he is English. DL So, the whole GLIMMER thing was all put together in England with Englishmen but LA is where the band will record and live in the States? GG Yeah, I guess. The whole thing really started in LA by way of England. Gary, myself and Martin, we never knew each other in England, we met in LA. DL The was band called THE CIRCLES that came before this version of GLIMMER though? GG Yeah, that was pretty close to what we are now really. Maybe it was a little more influenced by being a three piece thing and maybe the drums were a little bit more busier than they are now but it was pretty much what it is now. There are a lot of songs that are on the record that we were playing then, we just changed them around a little bit to fit the situation. DL You had a great deal of success in England with THE LONDON QUIREBOYS, was it had to try and put together a band over there knowing that there would be comparisons? GG Yeah, it is funny how you say that because, usually, I have people say "Well, do you think that you got this record deal because you were in THE QUIREBOYS?"(laughs) And I am like, "If that were true I would have had a good deal five years ago!" It is more of a hindrance, especially in England. Here, the QUIREBOYS thing is actually not a bad thing because the band was fairly well respected here. It was more of a cult sort of band here whereas in England we were very well known there and if anybody mentions that I was in THE QUIREBOYS in England they automatically know that band and the songs and all that. You get stuck in that mold and all that but it wasn't so bad for me because I wasn't one of the main guys in the band, I was just the guitar player, I wasn't one of the main characters that got all of the press. It can be difficult but I didn't have as much problem as I thought because by the time that I had come back over the QUIREBOYS had been split up for about three or four years and no one else from the band is doing anything very notable. The good thing about it was that there were a few journalists that were aware of who I was so I could at least get to them and get reviews and coverage so, I guess it helped in a lot of ways. It has been beneficial now that I actually have got a band together and I am out there, there is a sort of connection for some people to latch onto. DL When you made the decision to come back to LA was it mostly the offer of money that helped you to decide to try it again? GG Yeah, basically. It is funny that we had to go all the way back to England to get interest in America.(laughs) It was kind of strange but we were willing to do it. It was Just Martin and I at the time and we knew that it was going to be something good. It was just not what was happening on the music scene at the time and a lot of record executives don't look further than the next six months so. . . It was baffling to us and unfortunately over there it was really hard as well and it was actually hard to get gigs over there because there are so many bands and not many venues. The last time I was playing in England I was playing in theatres and bigger places so it was hard to get back into that. DL You have obviously made believers out of some people, I mean this record is being distributed by Atlantic. GG Yeah, I mean, we had always had people who were totally into the stuff that we were doing but it was just that, for one reason or another, they were just unable make it happen where they were working at the time. The people that actually paid of r us to make our record were actually working at major record labels but they couldn't sign us. They actually did it all out of their own pocket on the side, so to speak. That was really cool of them to take the risk and it all turned out good. We are working with people that have been away of my songs for the last three years and now everyone is finally in a position to do something with it. DL The thing that I have really been getting off on when I listen to the record is that it is timeless. This record could have come out in the sixties or seventies or even the eighties, it is just classically good songwriting. GG Thank you for that. Yeah, I try to write from a pop angle really. I try to write stuff that I would like to hear on the radio and I don't sit down and write a chorus and try o write around that, I write straight from the beginning of a song. Sometimes the most important part of the song is the first five or ten seconds of the song, that is where you get peoples attention right away and from there onward it has got to get stronger. Sometimes I hear songs on the radio with this really amazing chorus but you have got to get through a really substandard sort of verse before you get to that amazing chorus so, I am not a really prolific writer or anything. It has taken me a while to get a bunch of songs I am happy with. I want to do a sort of pop type of thing but as a band we wanted to present it as a rock and roll sort of record with a bit of an edge to it. To me, the most exciting bands to go and see have always been rock bands and it is all really nice and well to write pop songs but those type of bands don't cut it live sometimes. DL There has been a strong resurgence of older rock and roll bands, do you think that is a good thing for new music or does it get a bit stagnate? GG I depends on the quality of the material. Is it strong material or are they just getting back just to milk it? I don't know, who am I to judge?(laughs) If it is a choice between working a day job or going out and playing to a full house of people every night, it would be playing for me!(laughs) It sure beats working down at the construction sight or something. The sad thing is that a lot of these bands that are coming back are showing all of the young bands just how lacking they are. Not that they ever went away but in the younger incarnation of this band we played a couple of shows with CHEAP TRICK and they were amazing. Those guys are probably old enough to be our dads, well maybe not that old, but they were amazing. Watching them play, it was like knowing that you still had a long way to go. DL This is only the first record for GLIMMER and it has been a good long time since THE QUIREBOYS ran their course so what else were you doing between the two? GG Basically, it is all a blur really!(laughs) The band split up and I tried to put together another band with our bass player in the QUIREBOYS and then he left and the other guitar player left and I was pretty disillusioned with it I said to myself that I was just going to try and write songs and demo songs and maybe I could get signed from that without having to go through the whole thing of trying to get a band together. I just played around town, not a lot and that is what I did. I had a couple of opportunities as a touring guitarist for other artists but my heart wasn't really into that, I didn't want to do that because I thought that it would take away from what I wanted to do. Before you know it five years have passed. DL Where did you come up with the title of the album and, I guess, the title of the song as well ? GG It was like, "We need and album title, we need an album title" and someone said, "Well, I like Silver Zone." And I said, "Fine." (laughs) It is cool. The song is one that has a sort of bravado and arrogance and trying to pretend that you are someone that you are not. It is a kind of a state of mind I guess where you are feeling on top of the world and a place where reality is not going to burden you.
DAVID LEE WILSON |