As the legendary Y&T prepare themselves for their annual visit to the UK this September/October, I got the chance to sit down with the one and only Dave Meniketti recently for a UK exclusive interview to chat about the San Francisco’s 40 year career, their special relationship with this part of the world, the fate of that robot, the band’s recent ‘Live At The Mystic’ CD set and plans for a new studio album. So enough of my preamble and let’s get “On With The Show”….

 

To quote from a famous children’s movie, “the beginning is a very good place to start”: as this year, marks the 40^th anniversary of the genesis of Y&T (known as Yesterday And Tomorrow way back then), with Meniketti joining the ranks shortly afterwards in early 1973. Does he ever catch himself and go “shit man, it’s been 40 years”?

 

“Yeah, I’ve been doing that quite a bit lately, actually,” the affable frontman replies with a laugh – although you can almost feel the accompanying wince down the Skype connection to his home in Santa Clara. It’s a strange feeling, actually. It’s not something I was paying attention to, but when you say it out loud, it’s like “wow”. That is quite a milestone, isn’t it?”

 

He obviously still enjoys doing what Y&T do…

 

“Oh yeah, of course. Absolutely. I am extremely enjoying it. In fact, there is nothing else I would rather have been doing for the last 40 years…”

 

Obviously, no band plots out a long term career plan for themselves, but if he was to put himself in the shoes of a young Dave Meniketti back in the early 1970s, does he think he would have seen himself still doing it 40 years later?

 

“No. Not at all. At that time, long term thoughts about our career was not something that ever was going on in my brain, or probably that of anyone else in the band. We were just thinking about the immediate future – six months in advance at the most… maybe a year or so… we were thinking about record deals and touring and all that kind of stuff: that’s about as far in advance as we were ever thinking. We would never have been thinking about five years in advance: you lived day by day, and looked forward a week or two or maybe a couple of months… ”

 

With a couple of mildly successful albums under the band’s longer moniker, it took eight years of graft, the shortening of the name, a deal with A&M and the ‘Earthshaker’ album for Y&T to ‘break through’ – and the UK audience got it almost immediately…

 

“I think so. We never really understood what was happening at first, until we came over there on the ‘Black Tiger’ tour in 1982: physically being in the country was quite a bit of a difference for us, because we had heard some things back in the States, that we were getting some pretty decent articles and reviews, and so on, but it wasn’t until we started playing over there that we realised that there was something happening… and it was quite a shock to all of us, quite frankly! Ever since, the UK has been like a second home for us”

 

This latter comment is borne out by Y&T’s annual touring cycle, which always includes seemingly longer and longer lists of UK dates…

 

“Personally, I just love being over there with you guys. Touring is touring: you love the shows, you hate the travel, but for me the travel is part of the vibe, and I just love visiting the UK. From the very first tour, just doing the club scene and the small halls, when we had no idea of what was going to happen, and the shock that it was to us. And then we got the offers of playing festivals over there, and that was a first for us, because we’d never even played festivals in the US at that point, and then getting the AC/DC tour in ’82 as well… those were all big events for us, and it all centred around the UK.”

 

Moving the Y&T story forward a few years to the latter have of the 80s, and the ‘In Rock We Trust’/’Down For The Count’ era, when the band’s musical direction changed and took on a more commercial vibe – as if the record company was pushing them to produce that all elusive platinum album: Uber Rock wonders if that is a fair assessment of what was happening at that time?

 

“Well, yeah. I mean, we were consistently being pushed by the record company, from ’82 on, but that’s probably changed for us because for ‘In Rock We Trust’ they insisted we work with another songwriter and, of course, we’d never worked with anyone outside the band before, and so that changed things.”

 

“I still think ‘In Rock We Trust’ is a great record, I’m still very proud of it, but it was a change. Working with another songwriter wasn’t something we wanted to do, and it was hard for us at the start, but we went with it. ‘Down For The Count’ was probably the one which was most affected by the record company getting in our face: it was a bad scene between us and the record company at that time. We had a lot of problems with them, a lot of fights, and even though there certainly were some great things on that record it brings back a lot of strange memories of all the fighting and all the discontent between the band and the company and what that brought into the band’s whole vibe.”

 

“The fact that we wrote a couple of great songs that got convoluted onto that album… it was probably the same with a lot of bands at that time. A lot of record companies were trying to push hard rock bands into a little bit more commercial success so that could sell more records, get them on the radio. We understood it, it made sense and it was part of the business, but at the same time we are all about music and art supposedly being all about the individuality of the artist. It was like “why don’t you accept who we are and try to market that?” But, that doesn’t work for record companies, at least, not many of them! So, we succumbed to some of the pressures of that time, but, then, we checked ourselves, got out of the deal and went on about our way, doing things the way we’d always done them…”

 

It was also around this traumatic time that two of Y&T’s founder members, drummer Leonard Haze and guitarist Joey Alves, departed the band’s ranks: for many years it has been believed that this move was also down to pressure from the label, but Meniketti is as honest as ever in his recounting of events:

 

“That was purely a personal thing that was going on. Quite frankly, the ’80s were fraught with high drug problems with certain people, and that is the reality of what was going on. It had nothing to do with record company pressures or anything like that. It had everything to do with problems with what I was just mentioning… you have to keep going, and you can’t do that if some of your band members are, quite frankly, too screwed up. It created all kinds of problems. We tried to solve them, we tried to make things work, but there was just no way around it: we needed to replace the guys to keep going on.”

 

“Luckily, both of the guys got their shit together, eventually, and they have been much better off because of it, but at that time they were major problems that we couldn’t get over…”

 

Does Dave keep in touch with Alves and Haze much these days?

 

“Oh yeah. Absolutely. We talk, I wouldn’t say every day, but we’re in contact all the time.”

 

Is there ever the temptation to work together again?

 

“We brought Leonard back into the band in 2001 through to 2006, when – and there were other reasons involved – we decided it was best to go our separate ways again. After we let Joey go, he had some physical problems, which he eventually got sorted out, and he decided he just didn’t want to tour any more. For him, that was: he’d made up his mind and he wasn’t going back on it. So, in 2001, when we got Leonard back, we asked him if also wanted to be a part of it again, he kindly refused the offer – not for any headspace reasons, not because we didn’t get along, just because he had chosen a life direction and wanted to stick with it, and we respected that.”

 

Closing the door on that chapter of the Y&T story, Uber Rock’s Johnny H has for many years held what the rest of our crew regard as a rather unhealthy fascination with the robot which first graced the band’s artwork and then became a part of their stage show. So, to satiate his thirst on the issue, we ask Mr Meniketti for a history lesson…just who the hell came with that idea?

 

“I guess you can slap me in the face for that one!” he responds. “We had come up with the song ‘Rock & Roll’s Gonna Save The World’: (John Taylor) Dismukes, who had done all that fantastic artwork, such as the snake on ‘Mean Streak’ and the tiger on ‘Black Tiger’, heard about the song and came up with the idea of this sort of this saviour robot.  All of his ideas were robotic anyway, so that went with everything. Anyway, he threw it out while we were recording, and we liked it.  The rock ‘n’ roll saviour robot… it was a cool look.”

 

“That spurred the whole thing about seeing if we could make a robot like that, which we then took out on the road! It was one thing that inspired another…it wasn’t a plan: we wrote the song, Dismukes heard about the song, he produced this piece of art accordingly, and we got inspired by that to make this 17,000 dollar investment into this robot! And, of course, we had to figure out who in the hell was going to get inside it, and how we were going to keep it on the road with us… it was kinda fun for a while, but, in retrospect, when I look back, it was ‘eh, yeah, whatever’…”

 

So, is the robot lying, switched off and gathering dust in a garage somewhere?

 

“Here’s the deal: we don’t even know where he is! When we let Joey go, he asked for the robot as a sort of “screw you guys, I want something out of this” thing, and we said “OK, we’re not using it anymore, so here you go”. As things happened, he gave it to a friend of his, his friend passed away and his friend’s wife took the thing, and there you have it… We don’t know where it went. We heard stories about it showing up at parties, winning awards for Halloween costumes and stuff like that… every once in a while, this woman will post on somebody’s Facebook page saying “I still have it, do you want it?” but we get in touch and she never answers… it’s like she’s teasing us…”

 

“We’d like to have it, just to have, just for posterity – maybe even to auction off for a good cause, or something like that, but we don’t even know where it is.”

 

 

OK, now we’ve got the frivolities out of the way, it’s time to bring the Y&T story smack up to date… after all, we are supposed to be here to talk about the pending UK tour – which this time has been prefaced by the release of some new product, this time in the shape of the, quite frankly, awesome ‘Live At The Mystic’ double CD/DVD set, recorded at the end of the 2011 world tour. So, why now for a Y&T live album?

 

“There’s a couple of reasons,” Meniketti states, getting straight to the point.

 

“Number one, we felt that there wasn’t anything out there that was representing the current band, how we are. Obviously, we have a new member, a new bass player, Brad Lang, who took the place of Phil Kennemore when he passed away, and we wanted something that Brad felt a part of and, like I said, represented how the band sounds with him. At the same time, the last live thing that we put out was a DVD in 2006 and, while we that that sort of represented we are at this point, we feel that the band grows every year and we constantly get better at what we do, and we really felt we needed to get something out there that really represented the latest version of the band – in not only the fact that we have a new bass player, but also the sound of the band and how we’ve progressed. It also represents a particular gig that we play every year that has become such a popular thing: it’s become a destination for fans worldwide… I mean, we get fans that come from all over the world to see the weekend shows that we do at the Mystic Theatre, so we thought it was a great idea to record one of those events.”

 

“For all of those reasons, it made sense to release this…”

 

In what may seem a strange move, the resulting album is only available through the official Y&T website, and not via their label, Frontiers Records.

 

“Well, we decided to do our own thing with this and offer it as a direct-to-the-fans release – much to the chagrin of our record company, but we told them that we would like to keep this in house and sell it to the fans directly, either through the website or at shows: they didn’t like that idea, but we’ve gone forward with it just the same: we felt that we wanted to make it more of a special release for the fans…”

 

Of course, as is sadly the case with modern technology, many so-called ‘fans’ have subsequently leaked their copies onto the Internet, with the album widely available for streaming and free downloading. When asked about his feelings on such things, Meniketti is stoical – and realistic.

 

“Well, you know, I suppose that happens with everybody, doesn’t it? This is the day and age of uploading things and streaming them to people. You can’t stop that. Even if it was out there through our record company, and they had released it through retailers, it still would be done…”

 

So, he’s not going to hunting down ‘fans’ that, it could be argued, have betrayed the band’s trust?

 

“Well, you just can’t keep up with it. Even if you could find the fans who did it, that would be one thing, but you have these places like BitTorrent who do it with everything, they do it with movies and TV shows, you can find it if you want to find it! There’s not much we can do about it. You can’t sue the people. You can’t even find them, and even if you did, it’s not worth it, because you find one and then another ten crop up… it’s just the nature of the business nowadays.”

 

Y&T’s annual pilgrimages to the UK have become something of landmarks and increasingly will over the next few years: the 2011 tour marked the 30^th anniversary of the release of the breakthrough ‘Earthshaker’ album, and the band more or less played that opus in its entirety at every gig… it’s almost logical to expect that ‘Black Tiger’ will get the same treatment more or less 12 months later?

 

“Yeah, we’ll be doing that on occasion. I mean, we don’t want to do it at every show. We want to pick and choose shows where we want to do it, and random… we’ve had any number of fans who have come on to our website or the forum or Facebook and say ‘we’d really love it if you’d play it at this show’, and we’ll go ‘alright, we’ve got a lot of requests to do it as this show, we’ll do it. Quite frankly, playing the entire ‘Black Tiger’ record is not that much different from playing some of our sets that we play any way, because we play so many tracks from it over the years: it’s like we add another two songs into the set and we’re playing the entire ‘Black Tiger’,” he laughs.

 

“Next year, for ‘Mean Streak’, that might be a different story, because there’s quite a few tracks we don’t play that will be fun to play, because I enjoy the tunes: it’s not that I don’t enjoy ‘Black Tiger’, it’s just that we don’t often play some of the deeper tracks of ‘Mean Streak’, so it will be fun…”

 

That will give us something to look forward to, certainly – as will the prospect of a new studio album. Just as the ‘Live At The Mystic’ set captures Y&T as they are on stage at the moment, Meniketti promises that it will not be another 13 years before a new set of classic hard rock is heading our way…

 

“We haven’t etched it in stone, like saying “this is when we’re going to stay off the road and write” – because that’s what we really need to do. Some bands write songs when they’re on the road, but that’s not for us: we may come up with ideas on the road, but it’s my style, and it’s always been the band’s style, to sit there and concentrate on writing – and we have to do that when we’re off the road. So, I would say, probably some time in the first half of next year we’ll try to commit to that and come up with a new record…”

 

Well there you have it an Uber Rock exclusive regarding the all new Y&T album due out in 2013, In the meantime we have Y&T’s UK autumn tour dates to look forward to and in case you’ve not seen them yet let Uber Rock help you out as they are as follows:

September 28^th – The Village, Dublin

September 29^th – The Limelight, Belfast

October 2^nd – Electric Circus, Edinburgh

October 4^th – Classic Grand, Glasgow

October 5^th – Academy, Newcastle

October 6^th – Rock City, Nottingham

October 9^th – Slade Rooms, Wolverhampton

October 10^th – Academy, Bristol

October 11^th – The Brook, Southampton

October 12^th – Junction, Cambridge

October 13^th – Highbury Garage, London

 

Support on all dates is from The Jokers. Tickets are available now from all usual outlets.

 

See you down the front……

 

http://meniketti.com/

‘Live At The Mystic’ is available exclusively from http://store.meniketti.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=YTCD%2DLIVE%2DMYSTIC

 

[Photos by Jill Meniketti]

 

To visit the Y&T store on Amazon.co.uk – CLICK HERE