By Jym Harris You want hard? You want heavy? You want extreme? You want Halford's Metal Mike!!! What follows is an interview which takes place a few hours before Mike hits the stage with the metal god himself, Rob Halford. BALLBUSTER: So how did you hook up with Halford? MIKE CHLASCIAK: What happened was, I was doing my 2nd instrumental guitar record entitled; "Territory Guitar Kill", doing solo parts for that and shortly after I did a gig opening for Ronnie Montrose and a friend of mine told me that somebody e-mailed him a page from the Halford site saying they were looking for a guitar player. I just prepared a package, sent some videos, plus parts of tracks from my 1st album and the 2nd one, without an guitar solos. I didn't want Rob to think I was one of these guitar guys that noodles all the time. He loved it, you know? I got a call in about two weeks. We talked for awhile, and I came out to L.A. A month after my first conversations with management, we wrote about ten songs together, went into the studio, cut a 10 track demo, and here we are! BB: Do you plan on this being a permanent thing, or like a side project to your solo material? MIKE: Well I must say, the Halford thing is my foremost... that's what I do. If someone asks me what I do, I say: "I'm guitar player for Rob Halford." The solo records, you know, I love doing those albums, but I'd rather be involved in a project where there's a vocalist. When time will allow, and I have some down time, I'll do another guitar record to just maintain that fan base I've been working at for years. BB: With the solo material, why did you change the name from Isolation Chamber? MIKE: I put Isolation Chamber together because I don't want to be one of those guitar players who play arpeggios non-stop. Even though there's a ton of that stuff, I don't nessarily want to be billed as one of those "noodling guitarists". So I put a band name "Isolation Chamber" on that. That name changed when I was doing some live shows under the banner "Mike Chlasciak's Isolation Chamber". Then it was like, My name's on there anyway, and I ended up doing all the work, so I'm just gonna call it Mike Chlasciak. BB: Was checking out you track wih Pain Museum on "Ball One, Strike Two". Was that just a one time thing, or is that a full project in itself? MIKE: That was actually the 1st vocalist project I was doing. It has Tom Kaz from Mark Wood's thing on vocals, Gary Sullivan whose playing drums with the Cro-Mags now. I was going in that direction, but I don't really want to pursue the rap/metal thing anymore. We did 5 songs, I wrote some real heavy guitar stuff. The guitars are tuned way down to low 'A' with plenty of guitar solos! BB: What about live, as far as solo material? Is Halford how we're going to see you live, or are you going to do any live gigs outside of Halford? MIKE: Well I would never rule out the possibility of doing a solo gig. If there was any down time, I would probably do a solo guitar show, but the most important thing for me now, is obviously the Halford situation. That's what I do, you know? BB: What's the new track that's going to be on "Ball One, Strike 3"? MIKE: There's a song from my new solo record, that they asked me to contribute, and I said, "Sure, yes let's do it." However I can't recall the title at the moment. BB: Well I have a Ball One, Strike Two CD here for you now... MIKE: Do you? That's nice. BB: Have you noticed that the BallBuster exposure has helped? MIKE: The BallBuster Mag and the compilation records (Ball I and II) have helped me move product and became a great vehicle to spread the word about my music world wide. People have a good thing here, as the editorial staff is very receptive and cool to all kinds of music, and although the mag is available internationally they don't have a snobbish attitude. The Compilation CD's are great because they feature quality music, a lot of it from established artists and I think combined with the mag, it's a great example of how metal should be supported and presented. I have a lot of people come up to me at the shows saying they have heard of me thru Ballbuster and it's a good feeling. BB: What are those backwards vocals on "13 minutes after Death"? MIKE: There was this recording that says, "Man, relax, don't do it". and then something like, "Jesus will come knocking on your door someday." or something like that. It doesn't have specifically any huge internal meaning. BB: Who's voice is that? MIKE: Some sample CD of some stuff. I take stuff from TV all the time.. I have this whole library of stuff I want to use. I don't want to have one of those guitar albums where it's all solos. I think people need to feel a human element. you need to hear a voice. BB: Well, I think one of the highlights of the record is the Yngwie Malmsteen cover. Out of all the Yngwie material, what was it about "Bedroom Eyes" that made you want to cover that? MIKE: I felt there was alot of guitar playing type stuff that I've already done, and the singer in that song is just great! Adrian, a friend of mine from Boston. He's got that soulful David Coverdale type, almost like a Dio-ish sometimes voice. BB: He's got that slow Vibrado... MIKE: Yes I was pushing him to do that, As I wanted to showcase those type of vocals. BB: In the CD you said you almost killed yourself doing that song. What does that mean? MIKE: Well the song was almost done, and the computer crashed, and it got erased! So it Sucked! There was so much feeling in the song, and you could probably duplicated it once again. But that one take that you've got is the one. I was programming a bunch of drums on that' and that got erased. And at one time, I took a screw driver and just stabbed the drum machine because it had just erased. So, to this point, my studio drum machine got this big hole in the tom tom thing where the screw driver went. Funny but true! BB: What other influences do you have besides Yngwie as far as guitar playing, songwriting, etc? MIKE: Well I think Steve Vai is really good! because I feel what he brings to the guitar thing, is that he's really unpredictable. You never know what he's going to do next. I'm not saying Yngwie's predictable, but sometimes you can almost tell just right where he's going to go next, you know? With Steve Via, anything might happen, So what I wanted to do with my playing is to combine the melodic aspects of playing with something you can never expect where it's going to go next. Those two guys has those things. I'm trying to combine, and maybe put some of my own styles in there. BB: What are we looking at for future plans? What's on your agenda from here out? MIKE: Well there's alot of stuff, it's really good to say that. A lot of things are planned. Once we're done with the 1st leg of the Iron Maiden tour, we've got a few days off, and immediately jump into Europe, and do a bunch of dates there. I think we're going to have Overkill open for us. We're going to go immediatlly into Japan. After Japan, we're coming back for a really short Christmas break. We're gonna zoom out to "Rock in Rio" festival in Brazil. And after that the next Halford record, and we'll probably be on tour til like 2002 which is great. See, I was always one of those guys who sent out demos and CDs and all that kind of stuff, so in the guitar circle, I'm sure there are alot of people who are wondering what's happening. So when it's on that level of touring with Maiden, I'm sure alot of people have alot of questions about what's happening. BB: Yeah, suddenly this somewhat unknown guitar player comes out and we're just like, wow! who is this guy? Out of all the guys Halford could have picked... MIKE: Well, he was working with alot of people,but I think he wanted somebody who was really hungry to do it. See, when you see us on stage, we're like working it really hard. We're never, like, those guys who just hang out, like "ok, here's a song..." you know, we work for it, and just do the best we can I guess. BB: Well it's certainly a comeback after going astray with some industrial material, and got a little bit of press, that maybe some people wouldn't necessarily think was good press with things he's said recently... It just seems like alot of people are like, you know, if he's gonna come back as the "Metal god", he's really gonna have to have a kickass line-up and a kickass album!! Who's he gonna have on guitar? is a big question mark! MIKE: I know, I know. See Rob was one of those people who likes to experiment, and he does not like to be stuck within certain boundaries of "Metal" of what he should be. That's why he did "Fight". That's why he did "Two". If you look at it, He's been doing that since '91. It's been almost 8 years out of the "true" Heavy Metal thing. He said, this is his first true Heavy Metal album he's done since leaving Priest. Yeah, Rob just wants to go back and I think he feels most comfortable in that kind of state of mind on what he does, that's his home. I mean, he CREATED a big chunk of what Heavy Metal is today! There, you have it a conversation with one half of Halford's guitar assault team, Mr Metal Mike Chlasciak! Copyright 2000, BallBuster, The Official Int'l Underground Hard Music Report