SCOTT ROCKENFIELD speaks on
SLAVE TO THE SYSTEM & QUEENSRYCHE
by Mike SOS

LINKS:

slavetothesystem.com

queensryche.com

As the only man to sit behind the kit for Queensryche for a quarter-century, Scott Rockenfield has had his share of pinnacles throughout his impressive career. Yet Scott is not one to rest on his laurels, as he has many other irons in the fire besides being the driving force behind classic albums like Empire and Operation: Mindcrime. While chatting over the phone, we discussed his new side project Slave to the System, his custom drum wrap company, the new Queensryche disc Operation: Mindcrime II, and a host of other topics regarding his vast musical endeavors, his love for music, and how the business has changed since his inception to it back in 1982.

So that’s kind of what we did, and in the process of putting the band together, once again, Kelly had an idea of making a record, just relax, no outside pressure, nothing that made us a slave to the system, so to speak. And he’s been working with the Queensryche thing for a couple of years with us, and he really realized that being a band member so to speak, and then also the producing tasks that he’s done through the years that he’s kind of being a slave to certain systems as well. the music industry is a system; there are certain rules that go along with it, you know. It’s all good, but we were just kind of poking fun at ourselves, going, “Let’s not do that. Let’s not be the normal slaves that we’ve been”. I mean, Queensryche, a great thing, been around 25 years, but it’s somewhat a slave to a system as well. There are certain rules that we just abide by individually and collectively, that even if they are subconscious, we do it anyway. So, the slave thing was just kind of let’s have fun, make a record, no outside pressures, and let’s call the band Slave To The System, which is what we were not trying to be. The funny thing is that after the success of the record, if it does become successful, , just in the industry standards, if it sells or does well…we’ll probably become a slave to it. In short, we just want to be a rock band, have fun, and do things on our own terms.

MIKE SOS: So, basically, what inspired you to do a side project? Were you thinking about it before Kelly approached you? Were you thinking about doing something on the side?

SR: I definitely am busy, a lot of things are going on these days. In all honestly, I’ve actually been doing a lot of side stuff for many years now. It started for me back in the mid 90’s, kind of composing instrumental music on my own and in doing that I hooked up with the people in 1998 that asked me to compose for a computer animated short movie that was being released in Seattle. I did that and ended up getting a Grammy nomination for the music for it, and that kind of spurred me into going “Wow this is a cool thing,” and “Obviously somebody liked what I did on this. So maybe I should keep doing that”. So I’ve done about five or six records since then. Some are collaborations with people in the Seattle area, and I’ve done some stuff that’s on my own in terms of composing and writing and playing, and producing everything. I have a home studio and lots of toys, and I’ve done some work for film and TV and stuff like that. It keeps me busy. The band thing was just one of those things where, once again, I had some time back then and wanted to do it, and it was something to do for fun, and then the funny thing, five years later, it’s coming back to bite us in the ass, in a good way…by the way, I’m not complaining at all.

MIKE SOS: How did you start Rockenfield Music Productions and does that entail all of the side projects you do?

SR: It really does. It was just, just started as something to label everything that I did, and kind of a source for me to expand, make things legal and look nice. I produced a bunch of bands; in the last year and a half I did three or four bands. One was from Seattle that had a kind of a Nashville deal going, and a couple of others that are still kind of in the development stages. But, working with people and with Rockenfield Music Productions under my umbrella, that’s sort of what I did and then I, that kind of spurred into an offshoot, and I don’t mean to keep bringing up more things that I’m doing, but one other thing that keeps me really busy is, I own a custom drum company that comes out of Seattle, it’s called RockenWraps. It started out as a drum finishing company where we made custom drum wraps for drummers all over the world. It’s a family-run business and it’s going really great. We’re making drums and everything now, and it just kind of keeps me moving on a daily basis on certain things, and I get a connection with a lot of drummers. The cool thing is they all kind of incestualize themselves, if that’s the word to use, as all of my companies kind of feed off of each other. Queensryche feeds off of Slave To The System, and Slave To The System feeds off Queensryche, they kind of all work in harmony for some odd reason.

MIKE SOS: So what do you think sets Slave To The System apart from other bands?

SR: Well, our goal is just to write great songs that we enjoy. It was really done for our own benefit, to have a CD that we were proud of and that we just wanted to be fans of, and listen to and not get bored with, I think that’s been my goal since I started playing twenty-five years ago and Queensryche does the same thing, so, we kind of did that, and Slave’s project as well. I think what we are trying to achieve is we want to be a fun, hard rock band that writes great riffs, great hooks and melodies and slamming grooves underneath, and just go out and have a good time and not stress over the little things and not be pressured to be something that we’re not, and if we can achieve that goal and other people enjoy what we do, that’s really great. There’s so many different things you can do in music, I mean, it’s hard to say that any bands are better than others, we just want to be amongst them.

MIKE SOS: So, it’s not competitive, it’s more linear.

SR: It is. Unfortunately, I think, a lot of people equate music to competition. Hell, TV is full of that these days, but once again, my only competition is just within myself. I want to achieve my own success and my own happiness with the creative process.

MIKE SOS: How would you describe Slave To The System to someone who’s never heard it before?

SR: Well, once again, I think, hard rock. I think in terms of small words, we want to be just a really great hard rock band. Strong, powerful, thought provoking. Come and see us and have a good time, no holds barred kind of thing, you know?

MIKE SOS: What are you currently listening to? Would it be anything that we wouldn’t normally associate you with?

SR: Maybe. This morning my daughter insisted on cranking, at 8:00 this morning, My Chemical Romance…my point is, I listen to whatever my kids have got going at the time .Because I’m not in control anymore. So I do get a lot of that, which is cool. I get to hear a lot of things that maybe I wouldn’t have normally leaned towards if I didn’t have kids. My younger kids do the same thing, and I have an older son who’s fifteen and he’s really hooked into, he looks like the singer from Green Day. Eyeliner and stuff like that. I mean, he’s kind of into that mod thing. But, I get a lot of that. Actually a good example of something current that I do like, I really do enjoy the new Green Day record. I think it’s a great record. But I try to listen to a lot of stuff. I mean, I try to spread myself out depending on the mood I’m in on a particular day, and for the last few years, or actually the last twenty years, one of my biggest influences and passions is film music and people who have done film scores and all that stuff, that’s one of those things that I’d like to get to and through the other projects that I’ve done on my site and stuff, they lean towards instrumental class film type of compositions. So I’m kind of a big fan of that stuff as well. My I-pod has anything from Green Day to your current John Williams film score from the new Spielberg show. It just depends on where I’m driving and what I’m doing.

MIKE SOS: What can you attribute Queensryche’s longevity to?

SR: God, you know. I think that one of the things that really helped us carry on for so many years is the fact that we just tried to do things for ourselves. We don’t try to second guess what other people are going to want to hear, or we don’t try to follow trends, you know. We just sort of kind of do what we feel and from day one that’s what we did and for whatever reason, one of the first songs we wrote together, which became our EP, it ended up becoming a hit on the radio back then, and I’d never would’ve figured that. We were just never experts at figuring that stuff out. So we just wrote stuff for ourselves, and I think through the years, that’s what we’ve done. We’ve tried to challenge ourselves in two directions every time we do a new record, and in doing that, it gave us the longevity because we didn’t burn out to some trend that we tried to attach ourselves to, or we don’t regurgitate the same record over and over again because of the previous one’s success. So if that’s what it is, then we are all just hard workers, you know. We all just go down the path together, and we found an audience that liked the path. We’ve been together almost twenty-five years now, most people are my age now, and they are bringing their kids and that’s a cool thing. Teenagers are now wearing our shirts and going to high school the next day talking about us. It’s like a whole new generation.

MIKE SOS: What are the main similarities between working with Queensryche and working with Slave To The System?

SR: Well, it’s funny. There are definitely parallels to the Queensryche thing since we started it twenty-five years ago. So, some of the parallels are just my own personal work ethic, which is always try to be as good as I can and achieve the goals of what any particular song needs. Those are some of the kind of parallels business wise. We are all business minded people in Queensryche. I’m pretty business minded. We watch everything that goes on. So we’ve learned all sorts of different angles in business over the years. Those get applied and those are some parallels .The things that are different? I tried certainly to approach the Slave To The System record, as a kind of backed up a little bit and be raw, don’t be so nitpicky on everything. We made a Slave To The System record, made it… I mean, wrote it, recorded it and finished it in the first day that we ever met each other. I mean, Damon and Roman had never met before. From the first day we met, three weeks later, it was done, written, recorded and everything. That’s completely ass-backwards from Queensryche. Different approach, different types of styles, obviously. And the Queensryche thing, we usually churn, a record churns around for a good year before we finally put it to bed, which is fine. They are totally different, but those are totally black and whites on the approaches and how both bands operate. Live, the Slave To The System thing is more relaxed, more free willed. We shape things up every night, we just kind of keep it completely freewill, if that’s the right word to use and Queensryche’s not. Queensryche is more of a prepared machine, and we do things kind of in a way that warrants a different type of presentation. The cool thing is I get the best of both worlds. I get to have both, and I don’t get burnt out on one or the other.

MIKE SOS: What inspired the making of Operation MindCrime: II at this time?

SR: The funny thing is, it almost started the day after Mindcrime: I hit the street and was sold to the public, because we got people going. They almost wanted it then. You know what happened, a couple of years ago, after the Tribe record, which was our last studio record and that tour, we talked about what to do next, and we didn’t actually put a record out after that. We put together the idea of taking Mindcrime: I out and revisiting it 16 years later. It just sounded like something fun to do and in doing that, we kind of stayed on the road so long that we began falling into discussions about doing the follow-up. It was kind of like all of the sudden the MC: I tour brought everybody out and the media covered it. So, we kind of fell down that path and started working on it. While we were touring, we were writing, talking about it, and just kept doing it and just kind of ended up as our focus for the whole last year. We just focused on doing that in between the touring, and here we are now. Time to put it to bed and tell the fans to leave us alone.

MIKE SOS: How long did it actually take to get everything compiled, and did Geoff and then you guys basically sit down and have an idea of what you wanted to do with storyline thoughts and stuff and music, or did you just basically do your usual Queensryche thing and just let it, like, kind of like sit and fester for awhile before you can get into it or was kind of a combination of both?

SR: It was write a bunch of stuff, shoot it back and forth, usually we get to feed it to Geoff and Geoff would feed us back. Some stuff came instantly, and some had to germinate for months on end before we kind of figured out where it needed to go. It was pretty much the same process we do every time we make a record. We kind of brainstorm, feed each other back and forth and then see what happens after we’ve done that. And that’s what we ended up with. There’s no long road on this one, but there was a long road starting in terms of touring. .So anyway, the plan is now to take both out, Mindcrime: I & II and do the big thing with an expansion on what you saw last year to do a big show. Yeah, it’s going to be a lot of fun, and it just brings out some interesting looks on people’s faces.

MIKE SOS: Was it hard on the creative process to write MC: II without Chris DeGarmo?

SR: No, I don’t think we even thought about it. It’s been one of those things where Chris has kind of been out of the picture for so long now, but we just moved on. Mike Stone is with us on this now. He’s our new guitar player.
He’s got a great personality and he’s a great guy to work with, and hopefully he just decides to stick with us.

MIKE SOS: How was it working with Ronnie James Dio?

SR: Well it’s funny because I wasn’t actually there. Geoff was down in California doing some of the final touches on vocals, and Michael and Eddie and I had just been up here in Seattle. We had been done with a lot of the stuff for the record, our parts and everything. Geoff was down in California and Ronnie ended up just coming down there. He was in town, and that’s when everything was figured out that he was going to be the one to appear on the record, he was already down there.

MIKE SOS: Who else was in the running?

SR: You know, all sorts of rumors were going around which was interesting to see how that was going down. One of our first thoughts was Ronnie. We’ve had a really great long term relationship with him going all the way back to 1983, where he invited us on a tour in Europe for two months. This was back when I was a kid, and we had just hurried out and started it. So that was a totally cool thing. We were huge fans, and we had a great tour together. It was nothing but nice back then, and for years, we’ve bumped elbows, as bands and people, and, kind of always felt a mutual respect for each other. So when it came time, and his name came up in conversation, we decided to make the call. And when we made the call Ronnie said, "When and where? I’ll be there." It was about that easy.

MIKE SOS: To hear him and Geoff go toe by toe vocally is pretty exhilarating, I have to say.

SR: Yeah. The funny thing is, I didn’t even hear it until we were finished as well. I was kind of an outsider until I got a copy of it. “Here it is, it’s done,” and I’m like, “Cool”.

MIKE SOS: Any plans of taking this in like, a Broadway motif? Maybe a live stage show like a Tommy type thing?

SR: Well, you know we’ve talked about that a lot, even from day one, back in the late ‘80s, with Mindcrime: I, it’s been discussed. Now, it’s even more being discussed because, we have the complete story told now, and there’s discussion of that. Definitely discussions going on as well as discussions of possible film aspects, all sorts of things that’s just going to be kind of an unfolding. We’ll see if we can get some interest and make some people’s eyes kind of look our way. So, yeah, it’s all really cool angles for us to present this, and that’s kind of our plan, you know.

MIKE SOS: What are some of the similarities and differences between recording Mindcrime: I & II?

SR: Well, the time it took to do both is kind of relative, you think? We must have spent a couple of years just winding through the writing process of the first Mindcrime and II is obviously the same kind of journey. It took a while for us to see it all together, because they are so dense. They are deep, similarity wise, again, and the timing was perfect. Back then, the concept was inspired by what was going on in the world and definitely in the US, with a Republican President in office and what was going down in the media, and we kind of sat on a lot of that. It was about a lot of that stuff. And once again we’re back, and we have a great President in office right now that’s giving us a lot of stuff to talk about. There are hard and absolute parallels to that whole thing and that added a lot to both the processes. The difference was really the approach. The way we recorded was much different because to go into a big studio… Mindcrime: I was a big studio, drums in a room...I banged out 12 songs or 15 songs, whatever, and I was done. We moved on to the next part. This record was not that. Instead, we piecemealed it together as we went along. We all have studios, we do a lot of satellite recording as we call it, where we’ll pass off drives to each other and plug it in at home and work on stuff, go back and kind of fill in some more stuff. So, you get to experience a different type of interaction. We’ve been doing that more and more over the last ten years for example, and that’s how things have just changed through technology and everything, but there’s definitely a difference in how the two were made.

MIKE SOS: When did you get involved in music, and how did you get involved in any musical endeavors after that?

SR: I just remember being a kid. I started playing the drums somewhere around the age of 13 and, I’m 42 now so it’s been a good 30 years for me. But in school, I remember seeing some instruments, demonstrations at the elementary school I was in, and it really got me interested in what drums did. I thought it was a cool thing. After hearing drums, knowing I like loud, I would really annoy my parents with something like that, and it would be fun. Needless to say they weren’t annoyed by it, they actually really started to support me and help me. They let me do it, which must have been annoying in itself in the beginning because I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t coordinated. Needless to say they were always very supportive, and I just got into it, and as I got into it I just found it. I just really enjoyed it. I focused a lot on it, and I‘d just spend hours a day doing it. Now, I do a lot of keyboard stuff and write a lot of my own stuff, that was all kind of the same inspiration. I’m all self-taught with everything, I’m a hacker, I suppose.

MIKE SOS: What’s some of your fondest memories from Queensryche?

SR: The journey we’ve had over the last 25 years is a memory in itself. We’ve done a lot of great things together, you know? We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’ve been married longer than most people can say they have. And I think it’s just been really great, the whole picture to me is really kind of the memory, and all of the little things are all just kind of part of the big picture But, we are still doing it. We are getting ready to mount one of the biggest tours that we have ever booked in advance, and it’s really cool, things are going well. So we are just going to keep riding the waves until it dries up.

MIKE SOS: What is the main difference between the business when you broke in and today?

SR: Wow, there are a lot of differences, you know? The whole industry itself is labeled and everything. It’s a huge different thing. When we first got signed, 25 some years ago, like in ’82, we got a 7 record deal. Money is the food, and record companies nurture bands and let them go out and sell 200,000 copies, tour, and then they do another one and keep pushing them. They used to build this thing up where the band was worth something, it had a legacy to follow, and it became a success. It might have even taken 5 or 10 years for a label to get a band to get to that point, but I think that’s where the legends come from. So, needless to say, that’s a huge difference than where it is now. Now, it’s a hit or miss to get a record deal, and it’s almost like you need to sell plenty of copies or you’re just old news and they’ll get rid of you and get somebody new to push. They just don’t offer seven record deals anymore. It’s totally different and the whole internet thing is an absolute difference with that. Afforded for perks, as either way you want to look at it, but it changed the whole aspect of how music is delivered these days. So, yeah, was it easier 25 years ago? Maybe, but I don’t know if it’s easier now, I guess it all depends on your perspective.

MIKE SOS: Does it depend on what you are playing, too, and who you are catering to?

SR: It really does, and how you tailor. Some people go to the internet and all they do is sit around and worry about it all day, and you shouldn’t do that. It’s here to stay, so try to figure out how you can use it. Not too many people stress about it. That’s the problem with the label. They never figured it out in time and now they are trying to catch up. Hopefully they will. It really isn’t like it used to be, and the funny thing is, the guys with the label as well, I mean, are as volatile in terms of their jobs as with the bands. Back when we first got signed, people were at the labels, A&R people for 10-15years. You don’t even see that anymore. They come and go so fast, so they have to have one hit wonders if they sign a band or else they are going to lose their jobs. It’s just a totally different design these days. Once again, you’ve just got to play around with it and figure out what works best for you, define your own destiny.

MIKE SOS: What advice would you give to an aspiring musicians?

SR: Learn everything you can about your craft. I’m sorry, I get that question a lot, and it’s a great question, I think it’s an important thing. If you are the drummer, learn how to play, believe in what you do and just be real confident with what you are doing. But on top of that, learn the music business. Make sure that if something does eventually start to happen to you the way you want it to, that you’re in tune to what the other things are going to have to become with the business. Watching your finances and other people, just kind of keep track of business these days. I think that’s important. That’s one thing that’s helped us.

MIKE SOS: And what’s the best advice someone gave you?

SR: Get up in the morning and go to work and something will happen for you as long as you work hard every day.

MIKE SOS: Who gave that to you?

SR: I think it was my father. Yeah, and it worked I suppose. I thought that was great advice, I’ve always been that way and something has worked.

MIKE SOS: Cool. Any final words?

SR: Enjoy everything-- the music--Slave To The System, Queensryche, and .I appreciate your time.