JACK RUSSELL: ” I learned what I learned from what I went through” (2024)

By STEVE MASCORD

“YOU make sure you wish her Happy Valentines Day – from me.”

It’s early evening in London and I am on a Zoom call with a fellow who used to be on my bedroom wall, the former Great White singer Jack Russell. Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day 2024 and my wife is under instructions not to burst in on me and the man who taught me about groupies via the pages of RIP Magazine.

I’d read a feature in a more contemporary periodical, Classic Rock,  almost a decade ago that painted Russell, 64 at time of our conversation, as inconsiderate, reckless and selfish. It’s entirely possible this was true of the somewhat frail man who sits on the other side of the screen. But there’s no evidence of it.

Jack makes me cackle with his John Wayne impersonation as he discusses his upcoming book, an acquaintance constantly trying to rip him off, a half-finished solo album, doing a record with Tracii Guns without having to speak to him once and the unused footage from the Station Nightclub Fire documentary that he believes would make an excellent biopic on himself.

He recalled being tricked by record company executive Kick Van Hengel into covering The Angels’ “Face The Day”

Five months later he would retire from touring due to Lewy Body Dementia – the illness that caused comedian Robin Williams to take his own life – and multiple systems atrophy. Another month and those ails would kill him.

It’s a weird thing to be dabbling in music journalism at 55 and be interviewing eighties musicians for the first time. You feel like an 19-year-old club reporter but they aren’t 29 anymore. When they die, the sense of being forlornly late to the party is an inescapable component of the grief.

Of course if you are one of Jack’s estranged former Great White bandmates, the sadness must be many magnitudes later. I put it to Jack that he probably spoke to guitarist Mark Kendall more recently though than Tracii Guns, with whom he had just released the Medusa album that brought us together. It was recorded exclusively by files being emailed, with the pair having no contact.

“I spoke to Tracii – God it was a while back. But Mark Kendall goes back 13, 14 years. There’s no love lost there I guess. Nothing from my side.

“And the fact of the matter is, if they (Great White’s Kendall, Michael Lardie and Audie Des Brow) come and want to talk to me and want to stick out the olive branch … well I’ve put out the olive branch.

“If they want to accept it, great. If they don’t, that’s OK too. I understand. I’m not going to think they’re evil people. I understand it would have hurt them really bad. It would have hurt me really bad had it happened to me.

“Not getting into all that. I wish them well.”

Recording an album by sending wav files around, Russell says, is OK. But not his preference.

“… it is kind of a bummer,” he observes. “I really do believe you lose something there because there is a certain feeling you get when you’re in a room with somebody and you look at them eye-to-eye and you’re having a great time and you’re playing songs and you just have that camaraderie.

“Now,, with the advent of Zoom and stuff like that, recording from one place to another, it just kind of kills that.

“But still at the end, you come out with a great product – unless you’re a complete idiot. You know what I mean? I don’t need to have people in my studio to make me feel good or get hyped up for a song. I just need it to mean something to me.”

Russell’s biography is called The True Tale Of Mista Bone: A Rock + Roll Narrative and is written by Chip Z’Nuff’s wife, KL Doty. But Russell would not reveal the title when he spoke to me.

“I’ve been having problems with this guy who’s been trying to copyright everything I do, before I do, and steal the copyrights for my works,” he explained. “Songs, albums, this, that….

“It’s somebody I know. We’re already in litigation over the band name. He’s trying to claim my band name – my name. He’s trying to say that’s his. The whole thing. People do the darnedest things.”

Sadly with the benefit of hindsight, Russell appeared enthusiastic and optimistic about the immediate future, outlining a change to the line-up of Jack Russell’s Great White.

“The only difference is our drummer. Our other drummer went to do something else closer to home that wasn’t going to take him away from his family. He’s got a large family, a lot of little kids. They were missing their pops so he kinda hung the road up.

“So we’ve got a gentleman called Ken Mary, a fantastic drummer. He used to play with Alice Cooper. I mean the guy’s just rude on the drums. He’s one of the most well-known rock drummers – through rock drummers, if you know what I mean.”

And so to that documentary, which one hopes will now be made. On February 20, 2003 100 people were killed when the Station Nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, caught fire during a Great White show. Pyro was the cause, making it the deadliest fireworks accident in US history. Some 230 more people were injured.

A documentary on the tragedy called The Guest List was released in February 2022. It was originally going to be about Russell but the material pushed it in another direction. Jack says he’d like to see the rest of the film surface.

“There was so much footage. I mean, so much footage. You could probably put together a whole other documentary just on myself.

“Well, I know you could because there was very little footage that was used. We were recording it for three years.

“I think what we might do at some point is take that footage and make a little documentary with it. I mean, it’s sitting there and we’re obliged to use it. So why not? If it’s there, use it.

“I think people would find it interesting. At least funny, if nothing else!”

Funny? Well that might not go down well with some. When I ask Jack how he deals with criticism and praise in the public arena, he responds: “I would know where to even find that.

“I don’t go on Facebook. I don’t do the whole internet thing. It clogs up my life. I find myself doing nothing but that, between emails and … I have no time for my family and everything else. So I just try to stay away from that entity and just hear things generically. If I meet somebody at a show and they go ‘oh man, I read what you said….’”

As a young man, Jack Russell was jailed for shooting a woman – who survived – while he was robbing a drug dealer. He was so high on PCP he told police he had no recollection of the incident. Russell lived life on the edge, using drugs for much of it. HIs answer when I ask him about regrets and sliding doors moments has greatly added resonance now.

“I can’t predict the future or predict what it would have been like because that’s not necessarily what it would have been like,” he responds.

“If I hadn’t taken drugs my whole life, things probably would have been markedly different, you know? I’m sure I would have had a few brain cells left, more than I have now, but I don’t know if that would have changed anything in my career. I assume it would.

“I mean, I understand now that you shouldn’t take drugs. At least not in excess!

“I think I would have made some better business decisions.

“But I learned what I learned from what I went through and apparently I was supposed to go through it or I wouldn’t have. I believe it’s all a lesson while we’re here and you can’t understand it unless you go through it.”

Books, documentaries and beyond, we’ll no doubt continue trying to understand a man blessed with a voice that sounded like rich honey.

To contort a lyric he sung thousands of times, it’s all over now – but there certainly is something left.