Tony Harnell interview by Stephanie Kushner

INTERVIEW WITH TONY HARNELL

- Stephanie Kushner

I have been a fan of TNT for many years, so it was an honor for me to conduct this interview with vocalist Tony Harnell. I would like to thank Mark Morton at Chipster Entertainment and Dennis Clapp at Spitfire Records for setting up the interview. I would also like to thank Tony for taking the time to call on relatively short notice and for a great conversation!

"Well, actually, we did release an album in the States about two years ago."

"Yeah. But it really shouldn’t count! (laughs) It feels good to have an album released by a real record company, because obviously Shrapnel is not really a real record company, but I don’t mean to put it down! It feels great, and we’re really excited about it."

"It came about because Paul Bibeau and Dennis (Clapp) used to work for Mayhem Records, which is a label that was run by our former manager Mark Puma. Through that connection, I had some meetings with them (Paul and Dennis, now at Spitfire) while they were over at Mayhem about doing some things with me as a solo artist or possibly with TNT. It didn’t work out because Mayhem was having some sort of problems back then. They left about six months or a year later and I got a phone call from Dennis. We started talking and became friends and one thing led to another and it just happened to work out."

"That would be nice. We’re working on it for the U.S. We’ve got tours booked in Europe and Japan right now, but it’s difficult over here. But we are definitely working on it. We don’t know how we’re going to do it yet, if we’re going to go out by ourselves or open for another band or what’s going to happen. But we’re trying, because it’s been ten years at this point" (since the last U.S. tour).

"Oh, wow. I don’t think it’s comparable! (laughs) I think it’s so different. I think that with FIREFLY we sort of went, well, we hadn’t been together in about six years when we did that record and we probably hadn’t written anything for probably eight. And I think that we had all gathered up new influences and times had changed and the whole thing. A lot of people kinda’ criticized us for that (album) because they thought we were trying to be trendy or modern or whatever. But really all it was is that we hadn’t done any records in between, to sort of get to that point. We kinda’ had to get it all out of our system and do something that we just felt like doing. As much as people would like to say that it was a real attempt at trying to stay modern, it really truly wasn’t. We were just doing our thing, but we got a lot of flak for that. I also don’t really think that it was a completed album. We sort of had this great idea that we didn’t really complete, and left sort of this half-finished record. That’s my take on FIREFLY now. So with this one (TRANSISTOR) we just wanted to complete some kind of cycle and we wanted to get a little bit more TNT flavor that people would recognize, and yet still move forward. We didn’t want to totally give up and say ‘OK, that didn’t work. Let’s go back to our original style, we give up. We tried’, like a lot of bands did. ‘We tried to be alternative and now we’re just gonna’ go back to our old thing’. So we didn’t want to do that, because we didn’t believe in that. So, what we tried to do with this one (TRANSISTOR) was retain the essence of our sound from the eighties and yet do that in a nineties package. And I feel pretty strongly that is what we achieved."

"Yeah. Thanks for saying ‘different’! (laughs) We had no boundaries with that record, and I think we could have made it into something really amazing if we had a little more time. I also think we started going off the rails, and didn’t have anybody to really pull us back on track again, so that’s why I think it sounds unfocused. And that sounds like what you’re saying, too. In a nice way!"

"And amazingly, that’s not the way it was done. It was really all done within a very short period of time, and all of the songs were written in a short period of time. So it just shows how schizophrenic we actually were! But you didn’t hear the European or the Japanese version of FIREFLY, did you?"

"If you listen to the opening track, and ‘Angels Ride’, and I’d say about the first five or six tracks, they have some kind of relationship to each other and then it starts going off into some other world!" (laughs)

"What ends up happening is that we had such a big success in Japan in the mid to late eighties, and they tend to want to control things and have things different for that market. We try to accommodate them the best we can, to help them sell records. Our management originally gave them that (song) as a demo to show where we were headed with the new album, which was probably false advertising because that was a demo from 1990, when we were working on REALIZED FANTASIES. So, it was really kind of an unfair representation and we ended up going in such a different direction that we didn’t want to re-record that song. After we finished FIREFLY, they insisted on just having the demo on the record which I thought was really bizarre."

"The majority of it. There were a few songs that we actually wrote while we were in the studio. We had to finish up the record and we needed a few more songs. But the bulk of the ideas were written in Spain."

"It was great, because I hadn’t had any vacation to speak of in a really long time, I’d been working. It was really quite refreshing, and I felt like it was so easy. Ronni had a lot of material, a lot of ideas. He was there a week before me, and was there by himself, and so he had compiled a bunch of great ideas. So by the time I got there, he had made life really easy. We just started demoing stuff and really dug into the material. I just sorta’ let him get a lot of the stuff out of his system, and I started writing lyrics and getting the melodies together and adding some of my ideas. But I didn’t want to mess up his flow too much. We just had a great time. We wrote for probably five or six hours a day, and then we partied, you know, went to the beach, went out at night, and just had a really good, relaxing, enjoyable time and we became close with each other again, so it was great. The best part about it is, the first ideas that you get when you’re writing a song are the most important. You can always tear them apart later. But that original, initial flow of an idea is where the magic is. And then, to go in and arrange it and tear it apart and do all that stuff, that is more the craft of it. But I think the magic was definitely down there in Spain for some reason this time. We also wrote INTUITION in the exact same place."

"Yeah. I’ve let Ronni sing a few times. I say ‘let’ (laughs), but he has sung a couple of songs, like ‘Ordinary Lover’ and a few things in the past, to mixed reviews. I happen to think he has kind of a charming voice. I’ve always loved her (N.B. Norman’s) voice and she’s actually a very good artist in her own right. She writes great songs and she has a record out in Norway and Japan, I think, that Ronni produced back in the early nineties, and they just finished a new one. And I just love her, she’s a really great person and a really talented person. We did this song and I finished the vocal and I immediately thought of her. I thought she’d sound great on it. We brought her in, and she was in the studio for a half hour, if that, and it added the perfect thing to the song. I was really happy with it."

"No. Ronni worked with him on a solo record. Ronni did a solo album about a year or so ago called EXTRA STRONG STRING, and he produced that. Ronni sent it to me and I was very impressed with the production. So we decided together that we’d have him do this one, and I think he did a really nice job."

"He’s a very talented musician, he’s a great guitar player, and a good songwriter. And I think that the best thing he contributed is that he really pushed us to go places we hadn’t gone before, and yet still kept us in line with what we were. And I think that was a really valuable thing, regardless of how good it sounds or anything. I think that just from a standpoint of the songs and the performances he allowed me to go places vocally that I had been wanting to go but was too afraid to go, or to step outside of what’s expected of TNT. That’s always really frustrated me because I want to please the fans, obviously that’s important to me, but at the same time I have this burning desire to stretch out and try things and just try to be an artist. I think that it’s really a strange phenomenon that in the hard rock world, especially eighties hard rock, that for some reason the industry and the fans don’t allow bands to grow if they came from that era. I think it’s really bizarre, because if you look at any other sound that’s out there, even nineties hard rock, you see bands growing and evolving and changing into something a little different. It’s just really frustrating that for some reason if you came from the eighties and were somewhat successful, that there is some unwritten law that you’ve got to always sound the way you did in the first place. That’s one of the reasons that I think the genre died. It wasn’t just because Nirvana came out and the world changed. I think it was that the sound had stagnated so badly, and the labels started signing ‘B’ bands in the mid to later eighties, and then toward the real end of the eighties and early nineties they started signing ‘C’ and ‘D’ level eighties pop-metal bands, or whatever you want to call it, and it just started getting worse and worse and worse! And when you start signing bands that are influenced in the eighties by Motley Crue (for example) and all these other bands, it starts to get scary because they are so recent and there is no real depth to it, there are no roots anymore. I find that an interesting phenomenon, anyway".

"I agree with you. I think that obviously you can do a shitty album. You can try and do something modern and do something that’s not good because the songs aren’t good. But if you truly make an attempt to do something that’s fresh and people just shoot it down simply because it is not what they expect to hear, and they don’t give it a chance to stand on its own, then I think maybe you don’t need those fans anymore."

"Exactly. We’ve never had enough fans, anyway. As much as we love our fans, and I truly do, we don’t have millions of fans, we have thousands of fans. I think that on a really good day we may have somewhere between fifty and one hundred thousand really faithful fans, if that, and that’s probably pushing it a little bit, but I’d say it’s fairly accurate. At that point, that’s not a lot, and even if we were to sell that many records every time out, believe me, we’re not getting rich! (laughs) And being that is the case, why not then enjoy what you are doing musically? In other words, if you are not going to get rich by pleasing all of your fans all of the time, and obviously that’s not the motivation for us, why shouldn’t we go ahead and do what we feel like musically and give it our best shot that way? I feel like we have nothing to lose."

"There are so many reasons, it goes on and on. I think it’s a little bit of everything. We had big management in the early part of our career. We had Doc McGee, and we were there at the same time that Motley Crue and Bon Jovi were taking off and we were the third band, and it was just us three bands. So we really got pushed aside because they were so busy with the other two. At Polygram, we were competing with Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, the Scorpions, Cinderella, and on and on. There were a lot of really big bands there and we seemed to get constantly pushed aside. It was strange, because we were critically acclaimed many times, much more than some of those bands were, yet we didn’t get the same push. I think we were a little less radio-friendly than some of those bands, but it was a lot of things. I’m just very much looking totally to the future and to just do what I do!"

"Ronni did a couple of records with Vagabond, a band he started. They didn’t get any releases in America, but they did release some stuff in Europe and Japan. I did a solo project called ‘Morning Wood’ with Al Pitrelli and Danny Miranda, who is playing bass for Blue Oyster Cult now. It was kind of an acoustic-live record that I did in upstate New York, and it was released on Mercury in Japan. I was just playing a lot and doing a lot of session work. I was pretty much laying low. I was writing a lot of songs and working with people on some projects that never really got off the ground. There were actually two very serious projects that I was working very hard on, one up in Boston that never took off that was actually a really cool project that just kind of disintegrated because one of the members had a really bad drug problem, so I bailed out after putting a lot of time and effort into it. I was also working with an amazing musician named Mark Wood who is an electric violinist. He designs and makes his own violins. We’re actually still working together from time to time, trying to put something together at some point in the future. He was touring with Celine Dion recently for about three months in part of the U.S. and Canada, playing huge shows with her."

"I don’t know! I think it’s the music. I think that we have been really lucky and I think that somehow we have been able to maintain enough of a fan base to keep us going. Obviously, as each record goes on, it really becomes critical that we maintain a certain level, and we are always looking to pick up new fans. Up to this point, in my opinion, it has just been luck and, I guess, the recognition of our talents."

"I actually really like all the kinda’ off-beat songs. I think ‘Just Like God’ is a really interesting, cool track and I think ‘Into Pieces’ is a really interesting track that I quite enjoy. And I guess probably ‘Under My Pillow’."

"Oh, and my other favorite song, ‘Crashing Down’! (laughs) As far as the straight-ahead rock tunes go it is probably my top favorite. That is most likely going to be the U.S. single. But, you know, it is gonna’ be rough going in the States. We’re not expecting any miracles but we think it is a really interesting record and we think that if somebody has open ears enough to give it a chance and listen to it that maybe somebody will put it on the radio."

There ends the interview. Just to let everyone know, while I can’t promise Tony and the rest of the guys any miracles, I DID promise to put TRANSISTOR on the radio, and I have (I’m a part-time DJ at a college radio station in New York). Thanks again to Tony for the great conversation, to Dennis Clapp at Spitfire Records, and to Yutaka for putting this interview up on his site for everyone to enjoy!

Stephanie

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