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Zero Hour might be unknown for the most of you. But a small amount of prog metal fans is having a eye on them for the last couple of years. Because Zero Hour is not one of those countless typical progmetal bands. All right, their debut album, which is recently re-released as ‘Metamorphosis’, has still some obvious influential traces to what else than the everlasting prog-standard Dream Theater (but what a fine and successful interpretation of these influences!). But their second album ‘The Towers Of Avarice’ (2001) was a whole lot more difficult to place. Quite some impressive progmetal with an original identity. Because of the re-release of the debut album very recently and also because the band played some excellent songs of their yet unreleased album ‘De-Evolution’ on the Headway Festival in Amstelveen last spring, I talked to the guitarist Jasun Tipton about the present state of affairs. That means: where the hell is that new album!?!
Text: Evil Dr. Smith
Hello Jasun. Congratulations with the tenth anniversary of Zero Hour.
Oh, right on, thanks man. That you even think about this! But yeah, it’s the truth. It’s been that long already.
And I hope I do not offend you, but when I saw you on stage at the Heady Festival in Amstelveen, I thought you were very young, about twenty years or so. Nevertheless, the band’s already ten years old. So, are you the Jackson 5 of the progmetal or…?
Hahaha, I think that’s a compliment. My twin-brother Troy (the bassplayer) and I hear that a lot, that we are looking so young. I tried to lie about my age, but sometimes they catch it. In fact, we are thirty-two years old.
Okay, well let’s say that you are good in shape then! Let’s refresh your memory a bit: did you enjoy the show in Amstelveen?
Oh yeah! I totally dug it. The crowd was great for us. We always love play in Holland. Just like the last time we went over there when we played in Arnhem, Tilburg and in Baarlo on the ProgPower Festival. It was a great time. However to got to your country was less convenient. You know, it was during the World Trade Centre disaster. First we had a train ride for two hours to the airport, then we were on the plain, for god knows how long, like seven hours at least, then we had a lay-over for like 3 hours, and then the rest of the flight to Holland which was another 5 hours. And after we get off the plane, there’s the guy who picked us up, brought us to the venue and we played that very same night. While we had been up for 38 hours and had a huge jet lag. So as we got up on stage, we were walking zombies. But still it was a good show! When we went to Holland the second time we’ve done better and booked a straight through flight. But there’s something about Holland man; I really dig Holland a lot. No no no, not the clichés! Only our drummer said something about the wooden shoes. It’s just one of those things: you don’t know anything, until you go into someone’s back yard to see what’s going on. And all I can say is that the people are really friendly. No, that’s honest! I have a lot of friends in Holland that I keep in touch with, more than in any other country. And about the clichés: I like your sparkling ice tea, we don’t have that. And you have a lot of beautiful ladies over there! And what’s kinda nice is that our fan basis is definitely growing over there. Luckily, we’re friends with Sun Caged, and they helped us out by using their gear and things. And we played also some gigs with them. I think they have an album out by now.
Well, it should be. But I read something about a delay. Anyway, it hasn’t released yet. Yeah, it’s the same old music business! I think you can say more about that, don’t you?
Oh man! I remember our album ‘The Towers Of Avarice’ supposed to come out 5 months before it actually did come out. And the same happened with ‘Metamorphosis’, that one supposed to come out before it actually came out. You just never can tell in this business. But I think it’s not just due to the record labels, it’s also due to their distributors at the same time. They say like they have so many titles coming up this week or month, that it’s better to release it in a different month, just for better promotion etc. When it comes to a release date, it always gets pushed back for some reason. We played some shows with Symhony X once, and they told us exactly the same thing: their release was pushed back as well. And of course some months are better than others, when it comes to the release date. When we were dealing with other labels in Europe, they always told us that July is a bad release date. People are on vacation and so, and for some reason the music doesn’t sell quit as good during that month. They always have a motive for their excuse. I don't know, they are probably right. And no, I absolutely don’t have any influence in the release date of our albums. I wish they would come out a lot sooner. That’s for sure.
So your ‘Metamorphosis’ is released in July…
Yeah, who knows what the hell’s up with these people?!? But in fact, a little has to do with the artwork and things like that. Yeah, Travis (Smith) was very busy. And unfortunately, the kind of music we play is not really commercial interesting. It’s a very tough market to write for: we have long compositions with like never-ending parts. But that’s kinda our sound and we can’t fall away from that. We always want to put out a really good CD, that’s the number one thing. We also want to have a top-notch production as much as we can. But that cost a lot of money. So when ‘Metamorphosis’ was coming out, it took a will to come out, cause we were still in a negotiating deal with Sensory. We had to make some changes in the contract and finally everything got finalised on that and then we were trying to get a job on Travis doing the artwork.
But do or don’t you get a lot of attention now? Does the album sell good, do you get a lot of airplay and am I the 347th interviewer?
The one thing about this CD is that it was out before. It wasn’t the same amount of copies, in comparison to TTOA. When we put out TTOA, a year from there we recouped already. So we thought, wow, a record label does help pushing product! And we did make 2100 copies of the self titles CD, but when you think of who actually bought this album is probably about 1500. Yeah, you do send a lot of copies for promotional stuff, but let’s not forget my mom and dad must have bought about one hundred copies each. For five dollars each…
Hahaha, there’s the secret commercial success of Zero Hour!
Yeah! They want to share it with their friends or so. And I don’t know it was a battle between them, because my dad had like sixty and then my mom say: “Oh, I like to buy another twenty!” It’s like a game who’s gonna get more copies. It’s kinda funny. But the re-release is for all the fans who bought TTOA and asked us if we ever gonna re-release our debut album. Because it was completely sold out and a lot of people didn’t have it. So we thought it was a good idea to do it, but it was more than anything the main reason that we were able to put a little bit more money into our next recording ‘De-Evolution’. So it just make sense.
And you did a good job at it. Different artwork, extra couple of songs.
The two songs that we had, that is ‘A Passage’ and Rebirth’, supposed to be on the full release. The problem was we came down to the point we didn’t have enough money to mix those two songs. So we just left them to be. We were talking to two labels, we had Inside Out and we were talking to LMP. There were others, but those two were the best to do business with. But their contract-issues weren’t just good enough. Especially for the American and Japanese markets. That was a tough issue for us to sign. Now we’re still on Sensory and Ken (from Sensory) is been very good to us. If we want something or something different in our contract, Ken solves the problem.
And do you feel like a stranger in a strange land, playing progmetal in California? I don’t think you sell as much albums as Limp Bizkit or so… ;-)
Absolutely! It doesn’t sell worth a damn here.
Progmetal is a small scene over there in California. In another interview you talked about Dali’s Dilemma, Enchant and Maximum Indifference. That’s about it, regarding the progmetal-scene in your area. And you have professionally contact with all those bands: if it wasn’t for helping out with the recording it was to play some gigs together.
Yeah, and I can tell you: Dali’s Dilemma’s never played out, Maximum Indifference hasn’t played in a while and Enchant hasn’t played here in California for like…goodness gracious…for at least over five years now. Oh, and they play in your town next month? There you go man! By the way, the drummer of Enchant, Sean Flanegen, he played on my solo ‘new age jazz’ album ‘Night’s Pulse’. It’s just one of those things: you can go play Europe, but over here it’s almost a kind of a waste. That’s the problem with progmetal. It’s a tough market, cause there aren’t really any bands you can match up with to play. And always the same bill is dead boring.
And you played almost as much gigs over here in Holland as in your own country…
Yeah, and those were local show in America. But they were good shows. You know, we do well in our hometown (San Francisco), but if you go outside of it, it’s hard for progmetal. I remember Angra. They did ProgPower and that went out really well. But their next show was in North Carolina and they played for fourteen (14!!!) people… I mean, that’s just how it is in America. There are a lot of places in the Mid-West where you just not gonna draw. Progmetal is really underground here.
Even a band like Dream Theater?
Well, Dream Theater is the top of the level. They’re the biggest. They play in venues for 10,000 people. They just played together with Queensrÿche and Fates Warning. And Fates Warning is like the second biggest progmetal band, but they play normally for like two hundred people… Isn’t that crazy? You can go from a jump to Dream Theater, who can play for thousands, to the next band that plays for a couple of hundred…
And the third band is you, with fourteen people…
There you go man! But we’re lucky over here in our place, because we played for over a couple of hundred people in California. Anything outside of it - well maybe New York, we hear we do pretty good over there – and the States are huge, so if we’re going to Kentucky or to Oregon, we just not gonna have it, man. I think when it comes down to the people, I think MTV or music channels are all they know about music. And it’s really hard for people in the Mid-west to get a CD. What cracks me up is that Nevermore is huge in Europe and my brother’s girlfriend is a big fan of them but she lives in Atlanta, Georgia and she simply cannot find the CD over there. There might be only one store I know that might have one copy, but other than that you can’t find it anywhere. All right, Internet can solve this problem, but I think that still a lot of kids wanted to go out to the stores and buy it. They have the money and usually their moms and dads won’t give them their credit cards to buy it via Internet, so they buy it with money at the stores. The thing is, all the metal scenes are picked up again in the States, but the only one that hasn’t picked up is progmetal…which is awful! So it’s maybe frustrating sometimes, we truly love what we do musically. And for a progmetal band we sell pretty decent. That’s a kind of ensuring at the same time and we had also really great reviews. So, hey, what can you say? We love it, we love our music and obviously we don’t do it for the money. I do get royalty cheques, but I can tell you they’re not big! Hehehe…
Maybe it’s big enough to buy at least the last Fates Warning album when it comes out?
Oh yeah, and I buy a lot of CD’s so I’ll be all right. I love Pat Matheny’s music and I’m a huge jazz fan. So I buy a lot of adult contemporary jazz like Brian Culbertson, Norman Brown, Mark Whitfield. But I also love Meshuggah, Nevermore and the new Lamb Of God. And furthermore Killswitch Engage, Dillinger Escape Plan. I love all those groups. No, I don’t listen specifically to the guitars, I listen to the records as the whole concept. I’m not much of a guitar solo fan anymore. I had my days when Jason Becker and Paul Gilbert came out and I went “Ooh wow, that’s amazing!” But you’ve heard it now so many times, you just looking for a good song.
And it’s not anymore like you’re impressed by the technique of those guys, because you can do it yourself now…
Yeah, you’ve studied the same things as those guitar heroes once studied, and then you kinda know what’s going on. Plus I teach guitar, that’s one of the things I have to do to make a living. Yeah, that’s my real job! It’s like when we play with Zero Hour, after the show people came to me and ask me: “Oh, you must do this for a living!” And I said: “Oh no no no, I give guitar lessons”. And then they go: “Oh my God, you give guitar lessons. I want to have lessons from you!” So Zero Hour helps me to earn my money, only in an indirect way.
And you’re playing now for like twenty years or so?
Oh, I don’t know exactly. I took classical piano lessons for 4 years, before I took the guitar. I kinda had an idea what I wanted to learn on piano that I wanted to use for guitar. So I was pretty fortunate in that way that I know exactly what I want. Plus I was a big fan of Jason Becker, Paul Gilbert and Pat Matheny of course. I think I probably started playing guitar back in 1990, 1991 or something. Actually, I was a late bloomer. But luckily I took the piano lessons, which also benefits my musical theory, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And I practised a lot. I practised like eight hours a day for the first three years I played. And I really wanted to have an education for music, I wanted to go to some schools. And I had my dad ready that he wanted to pay half of the money, but my mom wasn’t into it. She said: ”No, you’re not gonna do anything with a musical career”. Unfortunately, that was how she felt, so obviously my brother and I did a lot of training on our own. But my brother, he’s been playing now for like twenty years. He always played the bass, and he’s always been good too. I really admired what he did. So he’s absolutely another influence on me.
When I saw you on the Headway Festival, to me there were three songs that were better than the other songs. And those songs were called ‘No. 1’, ‘No. 2’ and ‘No. 5’.
Yeah, those were all totally brand new songs! Mike (Guy, the drummer), Troy and myself half-tracked the new album. Actually, we tracked the whole CD even before we head to Headway in April. But our singer Erik (Rosvold) is having some serious family business at this moment. I don’t want to be using this as an excuse, but it’s like a catch 22 in a lot of ways, because Erik is just very slow in doing his vocals. Little people know, but it was the same thing when we did TTOA. We had the songs tracked down for like a year, before Erik finally had his vocals done. There’s no doubt about it: Erik is very slow. And that’s not like us. Mike, Troy and I go to the studio and bang it out in three, four days. And Erik will take months and months and months…So we have another band Death Machine coming out in October. It’s like a Soilwork and Meshuggah kinda band. And we’ve doing that because, well, we feel like we’re lazy when our releases aren’t coming out and we knew we had to wait a while Erik was doing his vocals. He takes so long and we knew already before that it will take much time. We have to help counting him in the time signatures and that sort of things. Of course it’s not the easiest music to sing, but we try as much as we can to help him out. It’s the same thing when we play live. Every time we play the song ‘Demise and Vestige’ Erik always comes in at the wrong count. He only came in right once in a live show…just once! But we laugh about it. Erik is a great vocalist, I love Erik’s voice and I couldn’t see anybody else for Zero Hour, but it’s just a little bit tougher for him to play in Zero Hour than for the rest of us. So he has a hard time with the hard time’s signatures and tempo changes. But that’s okay. That’s why we went into Death Machine. It was originally more of a joke, but then all of a sudden we got really serious response. We did really well with that band and it’s a lot of fun to do. So while we’re waiting for the next Zero Hour is coming out, we kept on playing music in the form of Death Machine.
So you don’t have any idea when ‘De-Evolution’ will come out?
I have no idea. It’s all up to Erik right now. He said he’s gonna start up on it, despite the family situation. But he said that already a few months ago… He hasn’t start on it at all.
Has it something to do with his perfectionism? Or is it more his insecurity?
Well, there are people that say Erik is a perfectionist. But there’s a lot that he puts on tape where we say: “Oh no dude, that doesn’t sound professional at all.” And maybe it’s our fault to say that, but it’s all for good reason. Erik can’t simply hear the odd time signatures and stuff like that, cause it’s so intricate. So we helped him out with the melodies. For TTOA he wrote all the lyrics, but to make it sound properly, my brother and I had to tell him what vocal lines he had to use. And maybe Erik has his insecurities with his vocals as well. Like: “How am I gonna top TTOA now? How am I gonna do that?” There might be some anxieties towards that, because he really thought he did a great job on TTOA and he’s like: “Oh, how am I gonna beat this?” And he knows that the music on ‘De-Evolution’ is definitely better than the music on TTOA. We went to the next level, so Erik needs to get to the next level as well.
Does Erik even understand Zero Hour’s music?
Well, Erik doesn’t even listen to progmetal. It’s like his other band, Marble, that is more like a bluesband. But he tells people that he’s no more into the blues.
But I start to wonder if Erik’s devoted enough to the music of Zero Hour?
He says he is. He says he’s devoted. And I have to go by that. I’m not going out looking for another singer, because I do love his vocals. He’s a great vocalist. The thing is, we don’t make a lot of money with it. It’s not our day job and I know that’s sometimes hard to understand for our fans. We put money into our recordings, it’s not that we make money with it. We don’t go to the studio every day, and say “all we do is writing music”. If we had that, then we could release every year or every year and a half another album. But it just doesn’t work that way. We have other things taken up our lives.
By the way, you just mentioned Death Machine. Am I talking to…
You’re talking to Jasun now.
Oh yeah, I know that for about forty minutes already!
Oh, okay! I’m sorry! I never know, because a lot people confuse me with my brother. On the phone we sound exactly the same. And then they say “Okay, which twin am I speaking too right now?”
Okay, I understand. Who’s the oldest by the way?
I am. I’m eight minutes older than Jasun.
All right, so you make all the decisions?
[chuckles] Eh…well…we…nah…we are both…well…
Okay, you’re the oldest, but he’s the strongest?
He’s definitely not the strongest! Don’t you ever say that again! Hahahaha!
But what I wanted to ask is that you have also a nickname in that band Death Machine.
Oh yeah, I go by the name of Thrak.
How did you come up with that name? It sounds pretty black metal-ish to me.
It’s from the King Crimson album ‘Thrak’. There you go. I love King Crimson and I just thought what would be a kick ass name for this. And what else could go better than ‘Thrak’?
Oooh, of course! Good name. Let’s conclude with a cliché: which of the three next albums is your favorite?
1. Rainbow – Long Live Rock & Roll
2. Queensrÿche – The Warning
3. Psychotic Waltz – A Social Grace
Well, that’s a tough one. So, if I’m on a stranded island and I have to pick one? Then… well, I have to give it up to Rainbow, man. Because the very first rock show I ever went to, was to go see Rainbow. No, not with Ronnie, I was way too young then. I was also too young for Graham, I saw Rainbow with Joe Lynn Turner. I had to be about nine or ten when I saw them with Joe Lynn. And ‘Long Live R&R’ is a great album, I love Dio!
I just saw him two months ago on a German festival Bang Your Head. He even played ‘Stargazer’!
Oh man! That’s the song! That’s my favourite one, man! That was a real progressive song back in the days. I always wished he would play that and God, that’s kinda nice he did it. Awesome! You know, he’s coming over here with Iron Maiden, so I might have to check it out then, knowing now that he might play that one song! God, I hope so!
http://www.zerohourweb.com
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