DOGS D'AMOUR & BUBBLE DRUMMER
Bam
PART I - Rock n Roll TV
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FIB MUSIC: What's new? What's in the future?
Bam: Oh my God. (laughs) Well we've setting up our recording studio. We're, me and
Share, finally replacing our old gear with new gear and we'll start doing another record. We are starting to move our stuff
over from the old tape machines to the computer, where everything else seems to live these days.
FIB MUSIC: You guys were still using analog tape?
Bam: No, we were actually using digital tape, but we just thought that we've
got to get with the program (laughs). It's just one of those huge steps for me...you know, I'm on the computer for
everything else...I do video editing for movies and music videos and all that stuff and I have my own show on the
internet. I use the computer for everything except recording. This is the final step, once we move this to
the computer then my whole life will be in a fucking silver box (laughs).
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Share (Pederson) Ross & Bam
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FIB MUSIC: Tell me a little about the website.
Bam: Oh yeah, right.
RocknRollTV.net Share hosts it and I film it and produce it, well we
both produce it and edit it....I taught her to edit as well. We go around and film up and coming bands...mostly unknown bands. Just
trying to give them a leg up, because I know how hard it was for me to get any exposure at all. So, we just go around and we
find bands that we like and we go and interview them and film them playing live, sometimes they come in our studio and
we do a session, or sit on the couch with Share and play some acoustic, you know, we're all over the map. We also cover general
bullshit, technology stuff, pop culture. It's cool because you get to be your own A&R, it's kind of like having your own
label, in a way, because you get to pick what you want to promote. We've had all sorts of bands come up to us
and say, "Can we be on your show?", we're like, "no" (laughs), it's kind of ruthless. We do it because we love doing it; we
just love a certain type of music, I guess. Some people may think we're assholes because we're not covering Rap, but I'm not
into Rap, so what are you going to do.
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FIB MUSIC: You guys are up in San Francisco, or Los Angeles?
Bam: We're in Los Angeles
FIB MUSIC: You also do a lot of photography as well, right?
Bam: I do quite a lot of photography....I've been a still photographer....my
father was a photographer, so I grew up in a studio. I was like child labor at age seven, you know, slaving away in
a darkroom.
FIB MUSIC: That's funny, I used to help my mom out in the darkroom. She was a photographer when I was a kid and we
had a darkroom in the backyard.
Bam: Oh wow. So, you know the smell of those chemicals?
FIB MUSIC: Absolutely. There's nothing like it.
Bam: I actually mixed it, I mixed the black and white side of it.
FIB MUSIC: I loved how the image would just start appearing.
Bam: Yeah, that's what got me hooked. As a kid, it was quite astonishing to
see something appearing from nothing, right in front of your face. These days it's all Photoshop and digital. I actually
have gone digital now, I haven't shot anything on film for the last two years. My old cameras are just
sitting in their cases.
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FIB MUSIC: I looked at some of your photos on the website and thought they were fantastic. Most of the time when
you see band photos, especially independent bands, they're a bit lame, but your photos looked like the real deal.
Bam: Oh, thank you. A lot of stuff I've got out there at the moment is being shot
backstage, at video shoots and stuff like that. It's this weird.....it's like the subject is almost acting, because they're lip-synching in
a video, you know what I mean? So they've got this weird quality of not quite performing and not quite, you know what I mean? So, I
think I tap into some of that.
FIB MUSIC: Do you use a lot of Photoshop?
Bam: Actually, lately I have been using another program called Lightroom, which is more
like a darkroom in a box. You can just literally rip the photo apart and cross process it, you can simulate the shadows and
stuff like that. It's like the old days when I used to get a roll of print film, like C-41 process and I used to process it as
slide film. It would take all the colors and twist them around. So, you get slide film like E-6 process and process it as
C-41, as print film, it did the same thing, but you get a totally different color balance. So, I love doing that kind of stuff.
FIB MUSIC: Did you design your websites?
Bam: Yeah, we do them all. Since me and Share had our band Bubble, we started
like, what now, eight or nine years ago. When we started Bubble we just started doing everything ourselves. We ended up
not just being songwriters and performers, but being everything else. We engineered it, produced it, mixed it....sometimes, we
had someone come in and mix it because we had just gotten sick of it. We did all the artwork, the websites, fuckin' everything
ourselves, because we just couldn't get any help, you know? Labels weren't interested. Even back then, it was like your 32, you're
too fuckin' old, fuck off, you know? Now I'm like four hundred and twenty; what chance do I have now?....This whole thing of making it is
just such a joke. As far as I'm concerned, any kid who writes a song, performs it, gets up on stage and performs it, as soon as
he gets off the stage, he's made it. They're successful, that's the whole point.
FIB MUSIC: Especially with the music business of today.
Bam: Fortunately and unfortunately we have the internet, which I think is the
last bastion of true democracy left on the planet. You know, everyone has a voice, which is a good thing and a
bad thing (laughs). But the whole business has changed, it's like a whirlwind right now. I do a lot of
"making of the video" stuff for labels like Geffen and Interscope. Geffen lost like 120 people at Christmas. It was
crazy. Those 120 people were, just to give you an idea, those 120 people were all creative. All the suits kept their jobs, but
they axed all important ones.
FIB MUSIC: I saw an interview the other night with the President of Warner, or some huge label and he said
the same thing. They also laid off a ton of people and he said they were trying to learn how to make money
in the industry and one of the ways was taking a percentage of touring and merchandise.
Bam: Yeah, their whole business model is changing radically.
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FIB MUSIC: One thing that's sad is there just doesn't seem to be any
new rock stars anymore. Even five to ten years ago there always seemed to be a steady stream of new rock stars in the
making. Plus, the mystique is gone.
Bam:
Yeah, I agree. It's almost like the media has told all the kids that they can be a rock star. Everybody is being told that
they are rock stars....you got this major cell phone and this amazing gadget and this MP3 player and you're fucking rock star and
here's this game where you can be a rock star......so, it's just kind of taken the edge off, you know what I
mean? My son Max, he's this amazing kid, he's like fifteen now and he's been learning to play guitar and drums all his life. He's hilarious....he's
got all these mates and every friend of his has got a drumkit, bass or a guitar and as far as they are concerned, it fantastic to
see, this delusional thing, they're already rock stars, even though they have never gotten in a room together and written a
song. But they all got the gear and everything......and they all look like fuckin' rock stars, the little bastards. They all
got their hair down and they all dress at Hot Topic and dress up like a rock star. It's really funny. They carry around MP3 players that hold like
8000 fucking songs on it. I remember carrying like eight or nine albums, 12" vinyl albums to my mates house and have to get on
the bus carrying this great big fucking bag of shit, you know?
FIB MUSIC: So, what else is going on?
Bam: Well the main thing is
RocknRollTV.net. That's getting about seven million downloads
a month. If anybody out there wants to be on the show, give us a ring.
FIB MUSIC: What do you do? Do you film a video and post it on the site?
Bam: Yeah, well we're part of this network with
PodShow.com, you can go to Podshow.com and create your own page, it's kind
of like MySpace. There are hundreds and hundreds of videos on every subject imaginable. It's kind of like YouTube. It's actually run
by this guy named Adam Curry, I don't know if you remember him.
FIB MUSIC: The MTV guy?
Bam: Yeah. He started it with Ron Bloom, whose this amazing session guitarist from the old
days. Those two guys got together and did this Pod Show thing. We found out about it from Michael Butler, from American Heartbreak, the bass
player. He's got an audio show up there, which is really cool. You've just got to check it out:
www.rockandrollgeekwp.podshow.com. So, we're part of that and that sends us
traffic, they promote it, they get us sponsors and stuff, which we dub into the show, which keeps the whole
show going.
Also, all the shows are archived, so you can just go to
RocknRollTV.net and you can click on the archives and you can
download....I'm working on....I'm just editing Donita Sparks from L7, we just shot, which is really cool. We did a great little
interview with her.....she's really funny. I think she's show number 91.....you can download 91 shows, completely for free,
put them on your iPod or whatever. Some guy from New York just emailed me, he had
downloaded the latest show and he was watching it on his iPod on the subway in New York. He emailed, "hey, I love this fucking
show".
We're also, our friends think we're kind of weird the way we eat. Share and I are on a raw food diet. We eat raw
vegetables, nuts and
seeds and fruit and stuff like that. We did a raw food cooking show, that's going to be the next podcast that we do.
FIB MUSIC: How does it make you feel?
Bam: Fucking amazing.
FIB MUSIC: Do you still smoke cigarettes?
Bam: Nope. I quit smoking three years ago; I quit drinking six years ago.
FIB MUSIC: Wow. A member of Dogs D'amour doesn't drink? Shouldn't that be a punchline, or something?
Bam: Yeah, drinking and smoking is now officially out of fashion. The way I play
drums, which is kind of insane, if you listened to some of the Bubble stuff. To play that kind of shit and sing backing vocals
at the same time, it got to the point where I can't do this, you know? I've got to change. I've got to do something.
FIB MUSIC: The raw foods diet must be a complete lifestyle change.
Bam: It is. I have always been a chef, always cooked....I cooked for my friends and I've
actually been hired as a chef a few different times on different occassions. I went from cooking sides of
lamb on the barbeque to preparing raw food and vegetables.
FIB MUSIC: Do you miss not eating meat?
Bam: No, not at all. I think it's revolting. It's just disgusting. I've read so many
books and all this stuff now. You should read the book, The China Study. It was a study done over 27 years by this scientist in
China and he basically says the amount of animal protein and when I say animal protein that includes milk, cheese and all dairy and
meat. The amount we ingest, without a doubt, increases cancer growth. We just eat way too much of that shit, you know?
FIB MUSIC: When's the last time you ate meat?
Bam: About 2 1/2 years ago.
FIB MUSIC: I bet it's easy to stay in shape.
Bam: Well the thing is when you start eating raw foods, your body just starts
detoxing right away. That's why you've got to go through a transitional diet first. I didn't read up on it enough when
I first started, so I just suddenly went competely raw. So I got kind of sick and green and pastey. That was my own body
spitting out the toxins. But the more I read the more I learned. It's quite amazing....I lost like fifty pounds in six weeks. I
was getting a bit chunky for me, I've never been heavy, but I was getting a bit chunky and feeling a bit depressed and all that stuff
just went away. I literally had to buy a new wardrobe. For a little while, I was dragging shit out of the closet. I've got this
old pair of leathers that I've had forever. For whatever reason I still keep them, for sentimental value or something. I just
put them straight back on. A lot of other problems cleared up as well....I was getting really bad tendonitis, especially in my
right wrist. What I have learned in the last year is, anything that has "itis" on the end, they don't fucking know what it
is. They're like, "we think we know what it is, but we really don't". Share had it in her wrist as well from playing bass and
guitar, you know?....and it's fucking gone. It just all disappeared.
FIB MUSIC: This is all going to be in your cooking show?
Bam: It will be a cooking show. Eventually, we will try to do it weekly. Right now, we
are just filming pilots for it and put them together and we're going to show people how to make this crazy food we're eating. For
instance, we make this like chocolate pudding, which is the most rich tasting amazing chocolate pudding you'll ever taste, but it's
made from avocado.....and I know you're thinking avocados, they're fucking green, yuck. By the time we're finished, you don't taste
the avocado at all. They just create the texture, the creaminess. I actually had chocolate pudding for breakfast.
FIB MUSIC: What's a normal day of eating like for you two?
Bam: Usually for breakfast we will have a big vegetable juice, that we juice ourselves using
this big juicer that we got. We might throw an apple in there to sweeten it up a bit and spinach, beets, celery and stuff like that.
A lot of greens, because that's where you get you calcium and minerals. You can actually get protein from greens, not a lot of
people know that. Romaine lettuce has lots of protein in it. The whole protein thing is a myth anyways. They always say you need
all this protein to be healthy, no you don't.
Then in mid-day we have a salad, but a much crazier salad than what you're used to. Just imagine chopping up everything that's in
the fridge.
Then dinner will usually be something lighter. The big meal of the day is usually the middle of the day. What happens naturally as
a human being, when the sun goes down, your body starts shutting down, your kidneys go into dialysis at night, which I never knew.
Once the sun goes down, your eyes send a message to the brain, put the kidneys into dialysis, start flushing the body, start cleaning
the body......and you know, that's when we all start draining the Jack Daniels.....our kidneys are trying to clean and we're filling
them with Jack (laughs). The fact that I'm still here, standing up and running around is quite like a miracle. You know, I kind of
went on that lost weekend for about seven fucking years. It's quite amazing the amount of punishment our body can take.
FIB MUSIC: Yeah. However,
Jim Morrison said the same thing.
Bam: Did he?
FIB MUSIC: Yeah, it was something like, "The body is built
to last" and his lasted until 27. He talked about it in the interview.
Bam: I guess he was pushing the envelope. Now, there's a man who could have used the
raw food diet (laughs). So, yeah, we're going to do a little show and try to show people what fun it can be. It's like anything, it
has various stages. Some people are just so religious about it, that it's painful, you know? It's the same as anything, you know
what I mean? You give the whole thing a bad name by being such a nut-job. You just use common sense.
FIB MUSIC: Does it cost a lot to eat raw?
Bam: No, not really. If you think of all the money you will save down the road on
cancer treatments and medical bills and all that......., hopefully. We'll find out. Get back to me in twenty
years (laughs).
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