RC: Hey, we're here hanging out with Beautiful Creatures,
fresh off the Ozzfest tour. They're touring with
Tantric, and we have...
Kenny: Kenny, I play bass guitar.
Anthony: Hi, I'm Anthony Fox, rhythm guitar.
DJ: DJ Ashba, I play lead guitar.
Joe: Joe LeSte, I'm hung over.
RC: Well isn't that typical for a rock n roll band like
you guys. Now this CD is some rockin stuff, from
begining to end. You guys came together in LA and
you're from all over. How did it all come together
so quickly and end up on Warner Brothers.
Joe: Well with the climate of music at the time a lot of
rap/rock and a lot of techno and stuff like that. I
just wanted to be in a rock band. I just wanted to
sing, I went over to DJ's house-got him-and we said,
"let's just do a rock band". Our intentions we're
never to go out and catch a big record deal or any
of that. We just wanted to play shows. We never even
played shows a lot, we just stayed in the studio a
lot and practiced. From DJ and myself we got Kenny
and Anthony and Glen. We went through a bunch of
different people till we all found the right people,
that could live and be the way that we are today.
The rest is history. We never really played any
local shows in LA. I mean our first thing was opening
for Kiss. We didn't even really have a name at the
time, we just continue to play and do our thing.
RC: How did you swing that?
Kenny: I worked for Kiss for a while. I knew the guys, so
I called Doc up and said I got a kick ass rock band
together with Joe and DJ and everybody. Give us a
shot, let us open up for 1 show. It just so happened
that Ted Nugent couldn't play the show because he had
said some derogatory things towards the hispanic and
gay communities.
RC: Not Ted, not that rebel on the radio.
Kenny: He couldn't play the show so they gave us a shot,
we played the show in Houston, they liked it and
brought us back for Detroit and East Lansing. They
wanted to give us the last 10 dates of the tour but
we had to go back into the studio and do the album
so we couldn't do it.
RC: Did you even have a demo to give the guys?
Kenny: No, at this point we didn't even have a name. I
think we came up with the name on the plane down
or something the night before.
RC: Were you looking at the KISS album Creatures of the
Night or something?
Joe: I had a card in my pocket that said something da da da
beautiful creatures, and I thought that would be cool.
The name was just thrown out off the top of my head.
Later on the line as we started doing shows and things
like that, Glen always thought it would be cool that the
name refers to the fans and not the band. Our fans are
beautiful creatures, that's what we look at it like.
RC: Especially the ladies.
Joe: Oh yeah, the beautiful creatures are the fans and we're
sea-donkeys basically. We're just a bunch of ugly dudes
that get out there and rock and do are thing.
RC: Now how do you entice Warner Brothers?
Joe: We had a manager at the time, who obviously had relation-
ships with different labels and stuff, and he said let's
showcase this stuff. And we're like uh showcase it! we
weren't even thiking, like I said, nothing was precon-
cieved. There was no idea of well let's go get a record
deal. Next thing you know a couple of labels, I think
Island Def Jams and Columbia or something like that, one
offered us a demo thing. Then Warner Brothers came in and
the guy watched us. I think when the guy who signed, Jeff
Blue, I think the whole reason he signed us wasn't really
the songs. It was the vibe and the fact that everybody
could play well and do what they did well. I don't mean
to sound boastful or anything.
RC: Oh well, there's some proficient musicians in this band.
Joe: I do believe that. I think he saw that and saw a future
for it. It's mind blowing! We're still sitting here today,
we can't believe we're on this bus, we can't believe we're
doing what we're doing, we can't believe people are out
there are buying our record. Nothing was planned. I mean
we were on the Ozzfest, it's all crazy to us, yah know?
We're just living the life. We're very, very, very fort-
unate and we count our blessings each day that we're fort-
unate to have what we have and do what we do.
RC: And be able to give it back to your beautiful creature fans.
Joe: Well we wanna be able to give it back to them, we wanna
fulfill everything for them.
RC: (turning to DJ and Anthony)Now you guys got some phat slabs
and some beautiful acoustic work. Tunes like "Wish" a
song I relate to because I wish I could start my own video
network. You can have your own envisionment of how it fits
into your own life. A lot of the songs have some good
acoustic work, I mean I want to go to New Orleans now and
hang with Kenny for a little bit. Now you're the lead
guitarist?
DJ: Yeah
RC: You bring a a lot of the melodic type leads in, which is
really bringing back a technical aspect, that has not been
seen in quite some time.
DJ: I think when I went to do the leads on the album it wasn't
about being flashy. It was about what are the best notes
for each song and trying to tell a story within the lead
itself. I've noticed, I've played guitar for quite a while,
you get more response and touch more people holding one
note than 50,000 notes that go by. But you can use that
for seasoning here and there.
RC: Yeah, that's always nice. A lot of the bands in the later
80s did a lot of the lead playing, it was just a billion
notes a minute. Do you think that that was what kind of
took the enchantment away from the rock? Where it just got
to be fretboard masturbation, so to speak?
DJ: Yeah, I think so. People worried about how many notes they
could hit and they kind of lost the feel. There's a lot of
great guitar players out there, but from my experience you
get more response off of a feel than speed.
RC: (turning to Anthony)Do you write a lot of the rhythms or is
that a coherced effert?
Anthony: Joe and DJ come up with the songs, they'll bring them
into rehearsal and we'll work on them. But they originally
have the songs pretty well controlled first, before they
come into the studio. Basically they'll come into the studio
with the songs, pull them out, and we'll start working
together with them.
RC: Everybody adds their own little piece to it?
Anthony: Yeah
RC: Is there anything scheduled for when you finish with the
Tantric tour?
Joe: We'll continue to tour and tour and tour.We're more of a
touring band. We're not really a video/radio kind of over-
night band. We want to be like Metallica.
RC: That's what I like about the video, it's very raw and very in
your element.
Joe: Well that's what it is. It's like an undergound thing. We
want to be a band that comes from underground and builds a
solid fan base, like I said, like Metallica. Before they
ever did anything high budget and did anything big it was...
RC: Ten years of hard work.
Joe: Well, if that's what we're gonna do, we're gonna do it then,
yah know.
RC: Were a couple of you guys in Bang Tango?
Joe: I was years ago, it was a cool band. It was a good run.
RC: I had a friend mention that to me. He knew the whole rout-
ine. It surprises you in a town where they tell you things
are so limited, but people do know a lot of stuff. I think
sometimes corperate rock undercuts peoples musical aware-
ness. This little show we do, I just try to get it out
there and get people to check it out.
Joe: We appreciate it, any form of media that we get that people
are gonna come and listen to the band or see the band. It's
really important to us. It's great that you're here doing
this and it's great that we get to do this.
RC: Talk about showing how appreciative he is, he even got up
out of bed to do this.
Joe: Well I had to get up at some point. I was up really late...
DJ: We stayed up all night trying to watch our commercial on TV
for HBO's Reverb. It's like 10 seconds long so we would sit
through like half a movie to try and catch it, but we kept
missing it.
RC: What was your most memorable Ozzfezt moment?
Joe: Mine was the last show that we did. They gave us a set of
rules for each band and we pretty much broke every rule,
every day. After a while they were like hey we don't really
care, they're having a good time let them do their thing.
But at the last show we were on the second stage, the Levi's
stage. From where where we were at, I believe about 25 yards
away, is a big reflective pool. Like a knee deep pool, al-
most Olympic size, and they surrounded the thing with secur-
ity guards. So we're playing our show and we had a really
good slot, around 1:30 or 2:00. So about that time it was 10
to 15,000 people. We just told everybody this is the last
show we're all going in the pool. And we're all wireless you
know. We go here's the deal, you have to help us get past
those security guys. The security guys are looking at us like
yeah right. I look over thinking I'm gonna dive out into the
crowd and go straight into the pool. I look over and all of a
sudden I see DJ standing by one of the security guys. He ran
down the ramp and around the back of him. And he's standing
there with his guitar...
DJ: The guy didn't know I was standing on the ledge right next to
him, he didn't even realize it. They had no idea I was still
playing.
Joe: Yeah, so me, myself, Kenny, and everybody went out there and
went into the pool. Then all the fans followed. We had the
whole pool full of people just having a big water fight. And
the security guards were just looking at us, they didn't even
do anything. They were really actually cool, they just looked
at us and went oh God, I can't believe this. Definitely a
memorable moment.
RC: Any wild things happen to you DJ?
DJ: Oh a lot, I think the most probably Spinal Tap thing that
happened to me was the other night before the Kiss show. We
had like 15 minutes to go on stage and it was like a good 10
minute run to the stage. It was down the hall, down a flight
of steps, and through the backstage. It was our first Kiss
show and we're all nervous and freaking out. I just got my
brand new guitars in, and I didn't know much about them. I
wanted to change the strings really fast, so I clipped all
the strings and the bridge shot out of the guitar like 20
feet. So we're all searching for peices of my guitar to put
it all back together. That's probably the most nerve racking
Spinal Tap moment I've had so far. But we go it together and
had a good show.
RC: (turning to Anthony)Now you've been writing E-Mails, logging
whats going on at Ozzfest with you guys, on your website.
Which was cool, do you have any stories?
Anthony: We had a lot of funny things happen, a lot of exper-
iences. One morning Joe ran to the wrong stage, a lot of
various things happened. We made a lot of friends, a lot of
parties on the bus, just a lot of memories.
RC: Well that gives you chance to network some amongst the other
musicians, on such a large venue like Ozzfest.
DJ: It was great, we got to see a lot of bands we've heard about,
but never seen them live. We gained a lot of respect for a
lot of new bands.
RC: There's kind of like a revolving door there, where a band
will be on for a couple of weeks then another. It's a great
way to hook up, make friends, and hopefully you can put
together your own tours later on.
Joe: Yeah, that would be something great to happen for us. It's
a very eclectic line up this year, I believe, and we're
definitely different than everybody else out there. Every-
body kind of has that angry rap/rock thing. We did some
Manson shows, some Crazytown shows, it was all good.
DJ: Yeah, great summer.
RC: That's cool man, we'll let you go, thanks.
For More Info go to www.beautifulcreatures.net
Click Here To Look At Pictures From Interview
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