Interview By Jason Songe

Photo by Zack Smith

I’m intrigued by the Bad Off because they seem like an anachronism, especially in New Orleans: a hard rock band of sex, glitter and sleek clothes who feature a lead singer that could’ve been the speed freak love child of Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler, plus a guitarist who not only knows every Jimmy Page riff but also writes solos like him. Of course, there’s more to them than that, or else I wouldn’t be writing this. Singer and leader Erik Corriveaux has the best and most expressive rock voice this side of James Hall, and the songs are head-bangingly catchy, hooky but also sensual, mystical, and full of wonder. The band’s an efficient live machine, a sculpture of razor sharp bends and breaks.

That’s also a good way to describe Lady Day, their first full-length record, which blasts into overdrive with opener “Bombdrop” and doesn’t let up through the next lean string of eight songs. Three or four years ago, the Bad Off was known more for their Led Zeppelin tribute than their originals, but with Lady Day they arrive with a soulful, stunning, and filler-less debut that energizes thanks to the positive lyrics (imagine a motivated hunter of experience).

Corriveaux started tracking Jody Smith’s drums at his Gentilly home the week before August 29, 2005 and didn’t pick up the record again until April of 2006, at which point Smith was gone permanently to New York City (and since replaced by former Rock City Morgue drummer Keith Hajjar). Bassist Dan Lauricella tracked his parts at Piety Sreet Studio with engineer Wesley Fontenot and was, as Corriveaux put it during our interview, “up Jody’s ass” with his playing, which sounded better then than it does written out. If you listen close to the bass guitar, you’ll notice Lauricella is right on top of Jody’s kick drum, which creates an awesome airtight power throughout the album. Next up was the rhythm and lead guitar of Brian Berthiaume, which, along with the vocals, was recorded at Misha Kachkachishvili’s Axis Studios in Metairie.

Corriveaux was more than gracious through the interview process. First, I broke my recorder at Pravda, so we went to his house and recorded the interview on ProTools. He gave me a CD, which didn’t work, so he gave me his iPod with the interview on it. After I frantically called him, believing I’d broken his iPod, he said, “Did you push the button hard enough?” Sure enough, I hadn’t.

 

ANTIGRAVITY: Talk about the difficulty of singing lyrics that come from a place you’re no longer at.

Erik Corriveaux: First, I can say that I don’t have much difficulty with that. Although a new set of emotions might be correlated to the topic of a song, at that point, as a songwriter and a performer, you have to take on the role of telling a story.

AG: Take on that character even though that character is in the past?

EC: Yeah. Just because one is not in love anymore doesn’t mean that they can’t sing about love. I am one who gives a lot to the song because it came from a place (of feeling). It’s the songwriter’s responsibility to express that character. There are certain songs that definitely have different emphasis on them.

AG: The most obvious thing is if you’re singing from a place of love and there’s no longer love, or maybe it’s just a viewpoint, maybe political, and your view has changed over time.

EC: You can take this song, for instance, “Song (For Loverman).” In the refrain, I was thinking about leaving one of the lines out, the second line in the chorus: “I believed I’d love you always and forever.” Just because I knew at that time that it was a pretty sensitive stage for me. I wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. I changed a couple words around, and it didn’t work. Brian (Berthiaume) said, “Why are you changing it?” I explained to him, “Maybe I just want to change the personification of it, the character, change the M.O. about it.” He wasn’t into it. He said, “You know, you wrote this in the genesis that this is how you were feeling, so you need to go back to it,” so I did.

AG: Do you feel good about going back to it?

EC: Yes, because I know somewhere out there somebody is in love and can relate.

AG: In between drummers, the band played as a three-piece in a stripped down format. What was that like?

EC: Those times were really good for us as a band, as songwriters existing together. It put us in a position to listen to one another in ways that we hadn’t before because it was delivered in such a raucous, brash way. It taught us a lot about refinement and accompaniment, space, and finesse. Certainly that was in a pretty fresh time of coming back to New Orleans and New Orleans being fertile with new growth. For Dan, Brian, and me to connect that way, it helped us immensely. Dan has been playing more cello. I’ve been playing more acoustic guitar and doing stuff with sampled beats. We’d be into doing that again. We have some songs that have a direction of going that way. We wanted to see how the songs could be expressed on a more intimate level.

AG: How did you come into your own as a lead singer? Was the process natural or did it take some time?

EC: It seemed quite natural when my other bandmates just said, “Fuck that guy! You sing.” Suddenly I was like, “Okay, I’ll do it.” That started out in the days of Orange Eye, which was a super, super cool angular power trio I played bass in with Johnny Foran. He and I were pretty much the start of the Bad Off. He played guitar. Felt pretty natural. I mean, my mother was a hairdresser. So, her clients were the older ladies that lived in the neighborhood. They would come to get their hair done on Fridays. As a kid, I’d stand up on the chair and sing Barry Manilow, and they were (in old lady voice), “Oh, you’re gonna be an entertainer someday.” So that’s sort of where I cut my teeth.

AG: So it was something you knew you would do.

EC: Yeah. I had bands that I played in throughout high school, but not as a singer—just as a bass player. The breakaway point from no longer playing bass and going to frontman—there had to be some sort of buffer zone, so I started playing some guitar. I learned a little more on guitar, and then I learned I knew absolutely nothing about playing guitar, especially when Brian joined the band. So I just pretty much was just singing, and some of that had to do with the fact that I was recovering from an injury, so that just made it more feasible to focus on one thing. After that it just became apparent that Brian was more than capable of filling out the sound. We just became a power trio with a vocalist. It was pretty easy.

AG: Are you still learning things as a vocalist as you go, though?

EC: Absolutely. I’m learning more about what not to do.

AG: Can you share some of those things?

EC: Brian is an excellent singer. He has a beautiful voice. Much slower, more sultry range. As far as refinement as a vocalist, I owe a lot to Brian, especially in the recording. He and Misha—those guys basically helped call out performances that I didn’t know were in there. We spent a lot of time on the vocals. A lot of slamming doors between the control room and the tracking room.

AG: There were fights?

EC: When aren’t there fights, Jason?

AG: [Laughs] No, it totally makes sense. When someone’s pushing you and you don’t feel like you need to be pushed…

EC: Those guys were majestic. They knew what the potential was, and they really fleshed it out of me.

AG: There’s a lot of character and attitude in your vocals on the record. Were those things that they fleshed out?

EC: That’s a key word—character—especially coming from Misha’s standpoint as a listener and a producer. He would say, “Listen to the character and the delivery you have in the first verse, and don’t let that apex in until you get to the chorus or you start to develop it more in the second verse.” We discussed a lot of things, whether the topic was me or someone else, but we always made sure whatever character worked best was the one that was best for the song.

AG: It doesn’t seem like it’s coming from a sheet of paper. It seemed like it’s just coming out of you, off the cuff.

EC: Beautiful. Thanks. It wasn’t always on the first take. There were some parts where the fortune of tracking these songs to a click track—it enabled us to be able to have all of these songs and the parts that were within, because everything was done to a click, everything was on the map. We could change some of the arrangements, and there was quite a bit of arrangement changes in the songs.

AG: Even with Jody’s drumming, from the beginning?

EC: Yeah, because he was the one that played to the master click track. We didn’t play to the click track—Brian, Dan, and myself—we played to Jody, whose drums became the click track.

AG: Way back when, when he put the drums down, the song is a particular organism. Then, let’s say the song starts to evolve. Can it evolve because he’s put it down a certain way, or does it have to stay rigid?

EC: Not really. Everything was recorded so clean. There wasn’t a lot of bleed, because no instruments were recorded at the same time, so we were able to change arrangements without it sounding stiff. All of the transitions were smooth. It was done mathematically pretty easily.

AG: Jody would be interested to hear what it sounds like now.

EC: He still hasn’t heard it.

AG: Would he be like, “That’s not the way I played it?”

EC: It’s the way he played it, it’s just the way we put it.

AG: Talk about what exactly Misha provided for the band.

EC: Misha owns Axis Studios in Metairie. He took on the role as a producer pretty quickly, once he realized how much more we could maximize the songs and the outcome. He continued to go over parts and say, “This doesn’t work. This guitar line doesn’t work. This deliverance of the vocals isn’t working, and he was a real stickler. To Brian’s and my liking, we were very fortunate that he pulled no punches. He told us if it sucked. He told us if it didn’t suck. He was very Bob Ezrin about it. Not so much where he’s telling Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, “You see those gold records on the wall? There’s a reason they’re on the wall. You shut the fuck up and do what I tell you.”

AG: When did you learn to trust him? Did you trust him coming in, or did it take a little while?

EC: He’s an icon for recording all these jazz greats and all the clean soul vocalists. For him to take on this project…it didn’t take long. I had a lot to go on, a lot of trust instilled by Brian and the way he felt about it. I pay a lot of credit to Brian for bringing Misha in, because without them on this record it wouldn’t be what it is. Those guys definitely tapped into the personal stages that I was going through and they really pulled out the prime meat.

AG: Brian’s solos on the record seem very thought out. He’s keeping in mind the space he has, very much like Jimmy Page in the way he maximizes the space and is efficient.

EC: The stank. That’s what cats like Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton do—you get the notes, the crescendo, the climax, and all this other stuff that falls in between—whether it has blemishes, it makes up part of that feel. That’s the sheen to it. Dan is a foundational bass player, there really isn’t a lot of that. He’s very solid. Dan’s the banker in the band—the one person you can always count on.

AG: What is Keith?

EC: Keith’s the foundation, and if that’s not there, then… Any person in a rock band, you can ask who’s their most important player, and I hope they would say, “The drummer is, of course.” As a functioning live band, since Keith has come in and stabilized that factor that was uncertain for us, it’s been great. I couldn’t ask for a closer friend to be in the seat, doing his best to contribute what he has and also implementing a sense of responsibility to, well, the songs that were written and recorded a particular way. He understands the arrangements and has done a very good job of filling those shoes.

AG: Is he excited to record with you?

EC: We did a recording with Keith over the summer, on a slower song that we put out on MySpace. It’s a song we have in the live set. He’s taken that song and made it one of the stronger songs of the set.

AG: Is that the jazzier one, the one where he’s using the ride?

EC: Yeah. It’s called “86.8 Proof.”

AG: Is the band making progress, as far as fans? Are there people you see at each show, or is the band still in the embryonic stage as far as that is concerned?

EC: We’ve been trying to outsource into having different artists share bills with us: the Bally Who, the Magnetic Ear. It’s really all about finding artists that are expressive, cerebral, and in the now. Cerebral in the way that it gets you thinking, but if it’s delivered in a way that it touched your soul, and it kicks you in the ass and gets you motivated, yeah… There’s definitely a lot of make-out records that I hold very dear to my heart, and I think that Lady Day is one of them.

AG: It’s definitely sexy, sleek and a very Saturday night, on the prowl kind of record. Very nighttime. It’s great for the car.

EC: That’s a great sign, because that’s where I listen to most of my music.

AG: Me, too. But you have to turn it up. And I’m not saying it like, “Crank it up dude!” I’m saying it like, “If you listen to it low, you’re not going to get the full effect. You turn it up and you’re pumping steroids into it, which is great.

EC: It’s a “get ready” record. There are definitely records I listen to if I’m primpin’, gettin’ ready to go out. AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” Who doesn’t pump iron to that record? Or Master of Puppets?

AG: Talk about where the band is and where you want it to go, being in New Orleans at this particular point in time. Do you have any goals?

EC: Our goal as a band in New Orleans is very much community driven and about solidarity amongst the other musicians and super talented people that continue to do what they do. I’d like to maximize the importance of the people that are here in New Orleans doing what they’re doing, and doing it together, and doing it without this catch of, “How much money is there? What’s the split of the door? Who’s gonna play first?” That’s one of those things where…

AG: You’re past that?

EC: Yeah, man. Let’s have a unified show for us as friends firstly. Secondly, for us as performers and, thirdly, let’s just all be in the vehicle together so we can give something back. I’ve worked and am continuing to work on the slashing of the ego and just trying to get more people closer together. To me, that’s a killer night. Having something for the people of New Orleans to all be together for and be in recognition of the people up there celebrating their art. That’s the most important thing. Our mission statement is to play loud, positive, upright, expensive, rock and roll. I would think that everyone needs and deserves a cerebral kick in the head from a kick ass rock and roll show.

Find out more about The Bad Off on MySpace.

This interview first appeared in ANTIGRAVITY Vol.5 #3 (January ’08).