Like Hammer to Anvil - An Interview with Spirit Caravan's Legendary Scott "Wino" Weinrich

by Patrick Kennedy

So tell me about your musical origins.

Well, I was always really into the Beatles, because I thought they had a really dark side to them.  All my favorite Beatles tunes were the dark stuff, like "Northern Song" off Yellow Submarine, "HappinessÖ.".  Then I started to really get into Hendrix, and at the same time, I was also into Sabbath, and I remember that was a big debate for me - which would be my first album to buy?  I was standing in the record store and I had "Are You Experienced?" in one hand, and "Paranoid" in the other.  That was a major issue in my life.  A couple years later, I was listening to GTB - back in the early 70's there were a couple of really cool radio stations around in the Washington area, and I heard a lot of really weird shit on this station, which was actually AM, WHMC.  I heard a lot of really hard rock music, so I started to get into some alternative shit, and by alternative, I mean like, one night I was listening, and I heard some Zappa.  That was the start right there, because I went right out and bought Hot Rats, and that was when I started experimenting with drugs also.  Zappa became the focal point, because, if I'm not mistaken, that particular record was instrumental, and I was always more into the guitar thing.  After that it was John McLoughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra's Birds of Fire.  When I heard that actual song "Birds of Fire" on the radio - this is where radio differs nowadays, and that blew my mind.  I can't neglect to mention Grand Funk, too, I was really into them, I had Grand Funk Live, and I was also into Johnny Winter.  Right around that time, In Concert, and Rock Concert were still on TV, and on night I saw Mahavishnu Orchestra on one of those shows!  And back then, they were still hard electric.  It was Billy Cobham, Jan Hamer, McLoughlin, and a couple other folks, and that was total virtuouso playing, but done in a hard rock vein.  I guess they were technically a fusion band, but it blew my fucking mind.  You've got McLoughlin standing there in white robes, this humble devotee with this screaming fucking guitar.  Ever since then, I really knuckled down on the guitar, and I realized there was so much more depth to music.

Were you into Hawkwind?

I didn't really get into the English or European prog stuff until later on.  I'm still kind of a Hawkwind novice, though I do have a few albums. 

Were their albums not as available back then?

I might have been able to get it, but I didn't even discover Motorhead until way later!  I discovered Motorhead first, then realized that Lemmy had an old band called Hawkwind.  Things started changing for me when the punk rock explosion hit.  Even though we were long-haired kids listening to Hendrix and Mahavishnu Orchestra, there was no denying to the power of the rebel fan. 

What caught your attention with punk rock and hardcore?  You were involved with the D.C. scene in the early-80's.

I think what really got my attention was the Dictators first album.  Believe it or not, we had the Dictators Go Girl Crazy!  And MC5 shit before punk rock hit!  And I was already way into the Stooges.  I had everything, Fun House, Metallic KO.      When the DC thing started hitting, I was pretty intrigued, and I would go down and see bands like Faith and Void.  I really liked Void because they were like the black sheep of the punk rock scene.  It was heavy, crazy shit.  And I'll tell you another fucking band who was cutting edge for me - SSDecontrol.  I saw them at the old 9:30 Club on night on acid.  That was real fucking heavy.     So what it comes back down to is that I always into stuff that sounded a little bit harder - Discharge, all that shit.

So how did your first band, the Obsessed, emerge?

We first put the name The Obsessed on the band back in '78.  We had two guitar players and were doing this very strange hybrid of Obsessed originals, some of which carried onto the Church Within - like "Decimation."  But we were also doing this weird hodge-podge of rock and roll.  We'd play "Yer Blues", a a few Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers songs, and then we'd break down into a Dead Boys or Dictators tune.  The other guitar player was kind of a beatnik, and he got me into Charlie Parker, and other jazz guys.   But the other guitar player got a little too spacey, so we decided to get Vance in the band, a full lead singer, and go for the full on shock thing.  That was another little phase of the Obsessed.  A lot of the punks were young kids like John Stabb from Government Issue, Sab Grey from Iron Cross, and they were coming down to see us play, and they'd tell me, "man, we love your originals, but we fucking hate the fact that you guys are doing these punk covers, it's so lame!"  In hindsight, you think about it, and I guess it's weird.  But we were just celebrating the things we loved.

When did you begin singing?

After we got rid of the lead singer, some time in the early 80's.  We figured we'd trim down to a three piece and get real heavy.  That was between 82-84.  We released a single on our own label - printed it up ourselves, and we did one track for a Metal Blade compilation called Metal Massacre 6.  That was pretty much all the Obsessed did at that point. 

So the band imploded, and you went on to play in St. Vitus?

Yep, onto Vitus.  The Obsessed had a name - we played New York and Philly, and St. Vitus was on tour, and were booked to play the New Loft in Baltimore, and they had this weird problem in Virginia where one of the guys got out of the van, and didn't tell everyone else, and the drive took off down the road without him.  It was their singer, actually, so they ended up missing the show, but when they finally made it through town, they stayed at a friend of mine's house.  While they were there, he played them some Obsessed stuff.  Turns out the singer was leaving anyway, so they were actively seeking a replacement.  They heard the stuff and said, "oh, man,

Wino sounds like Ozzy."  So they figured that was why I'd be a good singer for them, because they were sort of on the  Sabbath tip.   So they came through town again and played at DC Space, and I actually got a chance to talk to them, and the singer asked me if I'd like to join the band.  But it was a bit of a fight to get in the band, because at that time I had a strange haircut, and we wore a little bit of make-up.  The Obsessed had this death/glam look between 81-82, way back, and the singer from Vitus didn't like the look.  But at this time, I had pretty much outgrown all that, so I told them straight up, "I'm through with that phase anyway."  I got an audition with them, and moved out to California in 85, I think.  And I was with them until 90-91.

You didn't pick up the guitar with them right away?

    Not until Mournful Cries, which was our last SST release.  After that, we did do another two records for Hellhound in Germany.   They knew that I was a guitar player, but needed a singer.  They had told me from the start that they wanted to incorporate my playing into the band somehow.  The band was already established, and were personal favorites of Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, so they had their thing going on.  At the same time, Rick Rubin had been really into Vitus with the old singer.  So when I stepped into the Vitus camp, it was sort of with the understanding that I would learn the old stuff, and they'd work me in on guitar.  We toured and recorded Born Too Late, and started working in some double guitar stuff, and began collaborating.  I enjoyed the freedom of just singing, anyway, because that's when I really learned how.  There's something to say about not having your guitar to hide behind.  I used to be of the mindset that if you didn't have a lead singer in your band, that unless every member of the band sang three part harmonies, then it was going to be a little harder to make it.  If you think about most big bands, there is usually a focus - the personality of the voice really stands out.  You can listen to a couple minutes of Cobain and know it's him, a couple minutes of Danzig and know it's him.

So you concluded with St. Vitus, and rekindled the Obsessed, how did that happen?

It was a little messy, actually.   People ended up getting a little mad at me, and the Vitus dudes felt like I jacked them.  The way it worked, though is this:  after that many years in Vitus, I stopped liking the musical direction.  Dave Chandler was the guitar player, and he was the leader of the band, but his trip wasn't really growing.  I didn't think he even really wanted to grow musically.  His main objective in life was getting really loaded, and that was also my objective for a while, but at the same time I was always into broadening my musical horizons.  I got into this rut where I didn't like the songs Dave was churning out, and I didn't like his philosophy, so I didn't feel comfortable singing his lyrics.  I wrote a few tunes, but it was mainly his stuff being presented to me.  I decided to leave Vitus, basically, but Vitus was really big in Europe, and we were on a German label, and they told me to give it one more album, and that it was going to work.  I told them I had a lot of other shit going on;  old master tapes from 89 that I did with the Obsessed that never got out.  So they listened to it and wanted to put it out.  They were like, "hang with Vitus for another record, and we'll put this stuff out then."  So it was basically - "you put this stuff out and I'll stay with the band," which was like me holding a gun to their head in a way.  But I was getting frustrated and wanted something more.  They put it out.  Vitus did a tour, then we recorded V, which I thought was one of the best albums, then everyone else left, and I stayed in Germany.  I had brought the master tapes with me from 89, and I mixed them and Hellhound released them.  But that album got a bit of a response, so they wanted me to put together a band.  You can obviously see the friction.  Basically I asked David if he would be upset, but he said, "if you don't fuck me on this, then I won't be upset."  So I put together a band, which was me, Greg Rodgers, and Scott Reeder, who ended up joining Kyuss.  But before Scott Reeder, there was this great guy in the band named Danny, and he was a bass player from South Carolina, a biker that I had met from Greg Rodgers, and this guy was a monster!  About 6'5", and he had been riding Harleys his whole life and had this monster bass rig.  But right when we put together the band and planned the first tour, he died in a motorcycle wreck.  So we got Scott Reeder. While the tour was going on, I was still in Vitus, still on the same label.  Vitus had been home rehearsing and writing all the new material for the next album, which was going to be Children of Doom.  So the tour ends and I get back to L.A. and go to the rehearsal room.  Now I'm going to be honest about this, and this is what everyone wants to know:  why I left Vitus.  I get back to the rehearsal area, and they are just falling apart.  I didn't think they were very tight, and I didn't like many of the tunes at all.  Out of a whole albums worth of riffs, I liked maybe two of them.  So I'm standing there letting it all sink in, and David goes, "this is the song that I wrote to be the pop tune on the record."  And I was like what the fuck?  He gives me these lyrics, and they break into an up tempo song that I didn't think was very good, and here David is with this master plan to make this the pop tune, which was freaking me out, because this is St. Vitus!  I sang it a couple of times the way he wanted it.  After a couple of takes, he said, "wow, you sounded just like Axl on that one, Wino."  Serious business, right after that rehearsal, that was it, and I never looked back.  David swears to this day that I used them, and fucked them over, but it really was that statement on that day.  That summed it up, the respect thing was gone.  Those boys were all friends with the Redondo Beach cats, which later became Dokken and Ratt.  Now, Don Dokken was an old friend of Vitus' bass player.   Now here's the story they told me when I joined the band.  Some time a while ago, Don Dokken, before he was famous, called up Mark Adams, bass player of Vitus when he still played guitar, and wanted to borrow some equipment.  So he lent him a Marshall stack or half-stack.  Don Dokken straight up ripped him off!   Now I heard these stories about how Don Dokken blatantly ripped him off.   Now there was talk that Don Dokken was going to be involved with Vitus somehow.  Armando, the drummer, had always played Don some Vitus shit, and he only really liked the shit I wrote.  So there was already this influence of Don Dokken saying, "ursurp Chandler, and we can polish Wino's shit."  There was talk of Don Dokken actually producing therecord.  I said to them that unless that motherfucker pays back the money, I won't stay in the band and be involved with him, which he never did.  And guess who produced Children of Doom?  Don Dokken.  I left before shit couldhave gotten really ugly.  Pretty interesting how the mainstream pop thing intertwines with Vitus.

And you moved to Germany after that?

The Obsessed, we went back and forth.  After I left Vitus, the Obsessed kicked around for a couple of years, Scott left, and we got Guy.  Soon afterthat we signed to Columbia.  All of that happened in southern California.

And from there you returned to D.C. somewhat demoralized?

Yeah, I picked up a couple of bad habits in L.A. which is real easy to do.  After the music thing fell through, I had a bad attitude, and somewhere along the line, I started doing some things to make money that definitely weren't legal.  Eventually, I got burned out on the whole trip and moved back here to get my shit together and start working.  I wasn't really focusing on playing, because, like you said, I was pretty demoralized.  I figured starting up a new band was going to be a huge mountain to climb.  I had basically planned just to work, but then Gary and Sherman came along.  They were huge Obsessed and Vitus fans, and they really helped to pull me up and out.  They wanted to play, they wanted to jam.  They made it worth it for me to start it all up again.

Did you originally intend for it to be more than just jamming?

Well, Gary would call up and ask if I wanted to play, and I remembered feeling not that into it, but at the same time, they were so enthusiastic. Right at that time, I decided to get sober, so once I made that decision, after being a hardcore partier for 20 plus years, taking my first acid at age 12 and never looking back.  When I decided to get rid of that, that was when Gary and Sherman were wanting to play.  It was easy.  Me and Gary were playing, and Sherman comes bounding down the stairs, and we broke right into "Concrete Cancer," they knew the whole tune.  We bounced from one Obsessed song to the next.  Right there, I realized that since I worked at Drums Unlimited, I had access to rehearsal space, and I was clean and was able to focus.

I was under the impression that you weren't legally able to use the name "The Obsessed".  Is that correct?

Well, I called some lawyers and realized I still owned the name, and Gary and Sherman wanted to call the band The Obsessed, but I'd been through six line-ups of the Obsessed!  I figured it was time for a change, I couldn't get behind it.  Then, of course, we called ourselves Shine, and that's when the true legal problems came.  We knew Shine was a pretty common name, and we'd periodically hear about other bands called Shine - a rockabilly band from the 80's, a Dutch band, a fucking movie, but we had released a single under the name, and put a lot of work in it.  Then we got an email from these kids in Arizona who said, "look, we own the name, and basically, we hate to be dicks, but we don't want to see you in court."  I'll tell you something funny, which is indicative of this kind of music - most of our friends' first reaction was like, "I'll go to Arizona myself and take care of the problem."  Violence was the first thing suggested by most of my friends!  But that's not the way.  I appreciated the sentiment, but at the same time, that band legally owned the name, and they were protecting themselves.  We realized that it was a losing battle.  We didn't actually hire counsel, but we had advice by counsel.  There was no way we could have won.  We gave it up, and we were really bummed out, and we had our CDs done, but luckily they weren't printed up.  We kicked around a few names.  Ian MacKaye's suggestion was Shine A.D., but there were already a few A.D. bands out.  Then I remembered the on first Hellhound sampler, we had done a song for them called "Spirit Caravan," so I figured I'd run it by the guys, because it was a little bit dreamy, a little bit psychedelic, nothing too negative.  We figured it would take a while for the name to catch on, but with communication as fast as it is, but within two weeks I was getting mail from overseas under the name Spirit Caravan.   We just rolled right on.

You've also seen a style of music that you helped bring back blossom into a full-blown musical phenomenon.  How do you feel about that?

Well, the term Stoner Rock is becoming kind of like a bone of contention.  I think that term happened like other terms happen, like Heavy Metal or Prog, just for needing some adjective to describe a certain type of music.  What it means to me is that the focus is coming back to the music.  The first thing that comes to my mind is the Nebula, Fu Manchu sound of the fuzz driving the wah, but it also makes me think of kicking back in an easy chair, closing my eyes and listening.  The emphasis is once again on melody, and on guitar, and jamming.  More cohesive, whether it's a long psychedelic jam, or a blistering lead, it's back to the music.  I'm not going to diss any style of music, but in my eyes, the whole Black Metal/Death Metal thing is really anti-musical, and I think that's where a lot of them are going with that.   They are going for an ultra-fast, grinding sound with death metal style vocals.  It's really dissonant and anti-musical.  That kind of thing has it's place, and we're really in the heart of that.  It's in every publication - Norwegian Black Metal, Slipknot, etc..  That shows another aspect of our society, which is that these fucking kids are still pissed off.  To me personally, it's much more rewarding to see Hendrix close his eyes and play the slow blues thing at the end of Woodstock, than some little kid in make-up and nails talking about Satan.  In reality, you know where power is - in the music.  Melody can move mountains.  Well, anger resides in youth.  Well, I appreciate it, and I know that kids are way more receptive to some motherfucker right in your face going, "get up motherfucker!" than watching Hendrix.  Most kids would be like, "Hendrix is fucking dead!" and spit in your face.  I understand that, I come from DC, and we're all still pissed off at things in general.  We are on a major downhill slide, but the bottom line is that there is salvation in that melody.  The power of the song.  I couldn't name a Dimmu Borgir song, but I could tell you any song off of the Dictators albums.  That's just me, I don't mean to be too opinionated, but that's the bottom line with the stoner rock thing.   The emphasis is back on the music, and that's important.

Do you see the potential for this kind of rock being picked up on by opportunistic major lables and co-opted?

Well, yeah, but the same time I know plenty of folks with major labels who like my band, but they don't approach to sign us.  Major labels need that fucking hit, and that's the beauty of this kind of music - it is still underground.  And it's album oriented.  Radio programming isn't formatted for songs over three and a half minutes, and if you are a band like Sleep writing their album Jerusalem, or the Melvins writing Lysol, you're not considered even remotely viable commercially.  The Melvins are definitely special.  They've been doing it forever!  It has taken them this long to get where they are.  I have nothing but the utmost respect for them.  Their Atlantic records were really good.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Well, people who are starting out in music, if anyone gets any sort of lift or inspiration from what I'm doing, then I feel proud.  People always ask me if I feel bitter because all of these multi-platinum bands quote me as an influence, but I just feel good that I'm still around to be a part of it.  It's important to be a team-player, to stay humble, and to really stick to your guns.  There are a lot of pitfalls along the way, but if you believe in what you're doing, then someone else will too.   I'll be doing this as long as I can.  I feel super-inspired right now, and I feel real lucky that the climate of music allows this.  It's happening again, the rock is back.  I'm just glad I'm here and not sitting in some jail cell in southern California.