by PAUL SOUTHWELL
THE legacy of heavy metal royalty Judas Priest was bolstered by the superb contribution of American vocalist Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens. His CV now also includes singing for some heavy hitters in the metal genre, such as Yngwie Malmsteen, and now with KK’s Priest an offshoot, of sorts, from Priest. Outside of his various tenures and projects, he has his own solo works. Now, returning to Australia with the venerable house band from the memory filled venue that was Frankie’s Pizza by the Slice, Owens has delved into some of the heavier material of his legacy to hammer Australian audiences once more. We caught up with him recently.
HOT METAL: The first time you came here with Priest, in 2001, that was in early summer, too. So, I guess it’s good for the vocal cords?
TIM OWENS: “Yeah, I’m alright with whatever it is, I never know what’s good for the vocal cords. That’s the issue. Hell, I don’t know. But I would rather be really hot; the harder the better on stage.”
HM: How have you found doing Priest songs for maintaining the strength of your voice? Has it worn it down at all or changed it?
TO: “No, because I’ve just toured the last year and a half with KK’s Priest, and I always tell people they could just go to YouTube and find out how I’m singing still. There’s a great live concert of the Bloodstock Festival last year, and it’s not edited at all, and it’s pretty awesome. I’m probably singing as good as ever, really. I’m kind of lucky at 57 that I can still sing how I do. You know, I want to say that I was a little more confident, six months ago, but then, you have a couple bad shows, you go, I better stop talking. People like Ronnie Dio; that guy could drink with people before the show and entertain everybody. He was amazing. I’m a lot different. I have to really kind of not talk much and be ready. But I would say I’m a better singer than I was when I was in Judas Priest, just because I have more character in my voice than I did back then. But I’m pretty fortunate that I can still sing them all. For the KK’s Priest songs, we open with “Hellfire Thunderbolt”, which has super high notes, so it’s still there.”
HM: What would you say is the most challenging Priest track sing?
TO: “I don’t really know, to be honest. Maybe “Metal Meltdown”, which was on the last tour I did. But I would probably say a lot of the songs that I did, “Hell is Home” because we tune up, we’re actually tuned up one and a half steps from what I recorded it in. So, it’s kind of funny. Some of the songs from my era are a little tougher for me, I guess.”
HM: Is it range within the song, like just the number of octaves that you have to go, or is it just because it’s the power that you’ve got to project?
TO: “Yeah, it depends how hard you’ve worked to get it right in the studio. Any one of them could be tough at any night. You never know, but right now, songs like “Hellfire Thunderbolt” or “Sermons of the Sinner” from KK’s Priest are probably more difficult to sing than any of the Priest songs.”
HM: Okay, fair enough. Well, with the lineup that you’ve got coming down here, have you shared the set list with them or are they in for some surprises?
TO: “No, they, they got it. I did two shows last year there. Joel McDonald [guitar] and I have known each other for years. We’ve been playing, doing shows for probably 10 or so years and then. But last year I did two shows for solo shows. This is the band; I had Jordan [drums] and Joel McDonald, just amazing, and Voya [Mulitinovic] on rhythm guitar, and Andrew Hudson on bass. They are so good. I mean, it was such a great lineup that I messaged Joel and said, ‘I’m going to do another run, but more shows this time,’ because we did the last one last minute and they were packed and pretty much sold out, and it was like a month and a half in advance. But I said to him, I want to make some changes to the set list. I want to ask some KK’s Priest and Beyond Fear, maybe “Beyond the Realms of Death” from Priest. But he wanted me to change it. The guy wants the challenge. But, man, you talk about a good band. Oh God, they are so good. They are top notch musicians, man.”
HM: So how does that, that compare for you when you work with established artists, such as Yngwie Malmsteen, who would have this whole enigma and tales on how they operate?
TO: “Well, everybody’s different. For me, Yngwie was really easy to work with; we had a great time, and he was fine. Everybody’s different, though. Listen, I went from Judas Priest, so I guess once you join Judas Priest to make it, for everybody else, it’s going to be different. But the thing now is I tour all over the world with different musicians, or different bands of a band. In South America, I use a band. In America, I use another band. In Australia and Spain, I have a band. They’re fantastic. Then you come and you work with KK’s Priest and that’s my main thing. I just, like I said, did a year and a half of touring and that band’s so cool. But it’s really cool to go with the different dynamics. My goal on any band I play with, no matter if it’s my solo tour or KK’s Priest, my whole job is just to go on stage and sing as well as I can. I always tell people, when they ask me for tips or anything, I’ll say, ‘Listen, your job is to go on stage and blow people away. That’s it. There’s nothing else.’ You want to go on stage and let people go, ‘holy shit, that guy can sing.’ That’s what I want to do.”
HM: Your first solo album [Play my Game] and the tour that was with it must have been interesting since that album had stacks of guests on it. So, was it a challenge for the band? Saying to them, ‘Right, now you’ve got to go and learn Billy Sheehan’s bass parts, Vinnie’s drumming and Steve Steven’s solos?’
TO: “No, a lot of those songs I didn’t play after that, but, you know, they just learned it. You know, it’s funny because thinking about Billy Sheehan playing the “World Is Blind”, you know, I wrote that song, the music, and I wrote that bass line in the middle. I wrote it on a guitar, you know, down, down, down, down. When he played it, I remember sitting in the studio and he’s playing it because I wanted to be kind of staccato, but not. All of a sudden, he would just see these ‘boom, boom, boom’ moments. It was like, ‘Good God!’, watching him play it and making it come alive. I wrote half the record, half the music, and I would just tell people, ‘Just play, just play.’ Jeff Loomis, and Neil Zaza who played on “Play my Game,” I said, ‘once that starts, you just start wailing, I don’t care.’ But people, you know, they love it. They love to do it, you know, So I was pretty fortunate with that record. You know, my favourite record I’ve done solo was the last one, the Ripper record with Return to Death Row. That was probably my favourite I’ve done solo.”
HM: You had people that were in Quiet Riot and Dio, you know, all these big bands that are in it. So, do they have expectations of you when you get them in there?
TO: “Most of them probably did. A lot of them were my friends, but some of them were just probably getting a paycheck, so there’s probably a lot of them that do. But you could tell how much they cared about playing it because they all did such an amazing job. You mentioned Steve Stevens. I mean, I remember hearing what Steve Stevens played, and I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ I mean, you know, Greg Goldie [guitar] and Simon Wright playing the drums. I had my buddy from Beyond Fear, John Comprix [guitars] on it, and Dennis Hayes [bass]. But all those guys definitely cared for what they were doing.”
HM: So, has it given you an appreciation of singing and playing guitar at the same time?
TO: “Yeah, you know, it’s funny about that, I wrote half of the music on Beyond Fear and half of the music on my solo record. I never played them after I wrote them. I wrote the music and then handed it off to the real guitar players and the real musicians to play it. I’m just one of those basic guitar player guys. But I’ve never really played the guitar and sang it at the same time.”
HM: It’s a different way of thinking, apparently. It’s like two parts of the brain such as on piano using the left and right hands.
TO: “I mean, songs that I have played a little bit of guitar have been say “Highway to Hell” or “Living After Midnight”. I play a lot of times on the stage, I grab the guitar and play it. So, you know, those are easy. But I never really did. I never really played mine.”
HM: When performing and you’ve covered Priest and then gone to a Dio song, have you noticed a massive difference in the way that Dio approaches singing, with maybe a softer type of voicing?
TO: “Well, I think Dio is more aggressive than Priest. He has a much higher, natural voice. He’s more aggressive and punchier. Now, obviously, you just nailed it. He does have the mellow voice as well, and the feminine aspects. He can sound like a lady and then sound like the devil all in one thing. But you’ve got remember, that’s always been my style of singing. The only difference is he doesn’t have high notes. But, yeah, he had a much more difficult style to sing than the Priest stuff, because Priest is in my style of singing. I can do high notes and do falsetto notes to get to kind of fill in stuff. There’s no not doing that with Dio. It’s just full on.”
HM: Rainbow was quite soulful, almost blues based.
TO: “It was soulful, but it’s still more aggressive. Even though it was soulful, it still was more aggressive. I mean, “Man on the Silver Mountain” is up there. He’s my favourite singer. Dio’s probably my most influential and favourite singer.”
HM: I know there’s many career highlights, but what would be the career highlight for you?
TO: “Making it into Judas Priest was a career highlight because it made me do it probably, you know, going to the Grammys, being nominated. I’ve had so many of them. I mean, just meeting Ronnie Dio. But, I mean, you think about this kid from Akron, Ohio, that’s been on stage and made records and did things with so many people, and I do music for a living now. I mean, who would think that I could come solo, just book a tour, come to Australia and do solo tours and I do them all over the world like this. So, it’s that my career in itself is a highlight for me. I’m pretty lucky.”
HM: It must be pretty funny for you, too, in the sense that you rub shoulders with Zakk Wylde, Jeff Pilson, and people who were in that fictional Steel Dragon band, and film. They must have a good laugh about it, in hindsight.
TO: “Yeah. I remember one night, I was one show, I was doing the Iced Earth show at a festival, and Foreigner was playing, and you had Jeff there, and Jason Bonham on drums. So, it was the drummer and the bass player from Steel Dragon, and we got a picture. I don’t know whatever happened to it, but we took a picture, ‘You’re my band.’ But yeah, it’s pretty funny.”
HM: That’s just the way that mainstream kind of interpreted it. But there is obviously a lot of creative license in that film.
TO: “Oh yeah, it was loosely based and Judas Priest pulled away from it, and making it loosely based kind of sucked. I wouldn’t mind making some money from it and making it a little more accurate. But Judas Priest hit one deal with it.”
HM: Well, speaking of films, you were also involved with the soundtrack for Hairmetal Shotgun Zombie Massacre: The Movie.
TO: “Yeah, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, I did. Marzie [Montazeri] and I wrote some songs for that. Pretty cool.”
HM: Does that give you a sense of freedom just to kind of do something a little bit different?
TO: “Yeah, I mean it’s funny because I grew up with the people I like. I always feel like anything I do; I have freedom. So, I’m not pencilled in on singing one way mean. Two days ago, I sang a death metal hardcore song and then today I was working on a Rainbow styled song. So luckily, I get to do all that stuff. When your influences are everything from Halford and David Bowie to Jon Oliva, I’ve always been able to do anything I want, so it’s kind of nice. Working with Marzie for that movie’s songs was really cool because he’s like, ‘hey, it’s about zombies.’ So
all my lyrics were kind of just that. I usually don’t do that were kind of zombie-oriented stuff, so, it’s pretty cool.”
HM: You mentioned the Grammy nomination for “Bullet Train” from Jugulator, a song that you wrote with Priest. I guess you can probably handle the gong going to Metallica, right?
TO: “I guess I could, but it went to Metallica on a song that nobody knew [“Better Than You”]. So, I mean it was kind of like, ‘what the hell, is this a B side?’ Whatever. I mean it’s kind of funny. Then this last year, KK’s Priest made it to the final round. So, we almost were nominated for a Grammy for KK’s Priest, which would have been pretty cool, but we went to it last, out of ten, eight bands. We didn’t make the final cut. But yeah, it was pretty cool with “Bullet Train” being nominated for a Grammy.”
HM: What’s your recollections of writing with Judas Priest?
TO: “Well, I didn’t get to do much writing with Priest, and I understood it because it’s Judas Priest. You don’t go in there going, ‘hey, I’m going to write,’ you know, but I remember at the end, I was writing songs, and they didn’t want anything to do with them. Then “Scream Machine”, which became a big Beyond Fear song, was one of them. I wrote that and I wanted it to be a Judas Priest song, and now it could be a perfect one. But I understood it. It was Judas Priest, it was Glenn and KK, and they were writing a lot. They said, this is how we came up with this, it is how we did it,’ you know, and so I understood it, and I was fine with it.”
HM: I recall there was a Priest song that Glenn wrote, titled “Heart of the Lion” and Rob gave it to Racer X, from memory.
TO: “Glenn and Rob. Judas Priest wrote it, but it didn’t make the record. Then they let them record it. Yeah.”
HM: Do you find your voice has gotten a bit deeper with resonance as you get older?
TO: “Well, it’s definitely gotten a little more versatility, a little and more emotion, really. It is raspier, yet my high notes are as clean as could be, but it’s got just more versatility to it. I listened to my first record I did with Winter’s Bane, and people are like, ‘that’s one of the best vocal performances ever.’ I look at it as not being it because it just doesn’t have that… I sound like a kid. There’s not that feel to it, like there should be more emotion, more rasp, more girth and things. So, I don’t know if it’s deeper or lower. It probably isn’t, to be honest. I mean, I sing lower and heavier, but I think that’s the difference, maybe.”
HM: When you were fronting Priest, did you feel that there were people in the audience, or the die-hards, treating you in the same way that they treat say John Corabi for replacing Vince Neil? Notably, I’m not drawing any comparisons to the singers in Priest.
TO: “Well, yeah. I mean, I remember that’s why Ronnie Dio and I became good friends, because that’s what he dealt with. It was Black Sabbath, of all people, and Ronnie Dio said people used to sit out there and just flip him off. Wow, those are my favourite Black Sabbath records. I mean, yeah, that’s normal. The thing that always made me mad is I would just be like, ‘well, can you just listen?’ I did win a lot of people over when they came to the concerts and won them over because they’d hear the concert and go, ‘oh, wait, this dude can sing.’ That’s all I asked for, I mean, with KK’s Priest, you saw people listen and the proof is in the pudding. Just come out and hear it. But it’s even harder nowadays because of the Internet. But, you know, if they didn’t like me, oh well, they didn’t like me.”
HM: Do you think that’s because people associate the first few albums with core moments in their life and they just cannot separate it?
TO: “Yeah, people just think they’re right with everything. So, they think, ‘well, if there’s a new singer that’s not right, he’s no good, it has to be this guy.’ Even if I can sing better than the other guy or not, they wouldn’t care. They’re in their little world, or in their box now. It’s worse than it was then because now everybody’s a critic and they get on social media going, ‘you suck,’ whereas they don’t even know. I mean, it’s usually people that cannot get out of there. You know, get married, have my kid, go to work, eat McDonald’s, and live in this mind of, ‘I know everything. I should be the quarterback for that team. That’s not right, that coach is coaching badly. He can’t sing!’ And that’s their world. That’s fine, I worry about how I sing. If I’m not making them happy, I’m not making them happy.”
HM: It must be tempting to flip them off back.
TO: “I tell them to fuck off all the time. You know, here’s the difference; not liking a singer is one thing, but telling a singer that they suck, when they can sing is another thing. You don’t have to like me but when they say I suck and then I look at their miserable lives, and I’m like, ‘no wonder.’ All my band members for KK’s Priest, would laugh with me. People would say, ‘man, you suck,’ and I say, ‘hey, so does your Mum. Tell her I said hello,’ and the band’s like, ‘Oh, my God, you did just do that?’ I’m like, ‘yeah, I’m sorry.’ I love to have fun.”
HM: You mentioned also your recent EP, Return to Death Row. What was the deal with that?
TO: “Yeah, it was great. You know, it was heavier. Return to Death Row came out two years ago, just under Ripper, and it was very successful, and the reviews were great. So, I’m hoping. Jamey Jasta and I wrote it with some friends, we recorded it, and he produced it. So hopefully we can do a full length pretty soon. That’s the goal.”
HM: So, when do you know when a song is finished and stopped tampering with it?
TO: “I get to a point now where I stop tampering with it pretty quickly. Sometimes people tamper and then they kind of ruin it, and then you go back, and you think, ‘man, we should have kept it how it was,’ so I stopped overthinking vocals pretty quickly. I guess everybody’s different.”
