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Interview
by SashaS
19-12-2001
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Spirit in the machine
Anyone is defo a band that criminally got overlooked during the year
Listening to Anyone’s self-titled album over the months since its release in August, Slim Shady’s question repeatedly bounces off the cranium walls: “Kids, do you like Primus?” If you happen to then now you can safely add to it – Anyone. This American band is certainly on their own trip and with own agenda as singer/guitarist/leader Riz Story confirms in depth. With his elaborate hairdo and dressed if he were about to play with Jimi Hendrix’s trio, Story is a man with a theory, nay – a philosophy on music, society and life in general. It is a mixture of Indian thinking-cum-religion, acid dropout-ness, rock idealism and extreme rock lifestyle.
Anyone, from Huntington Beach (once a base to Korn that offered this band a contract with their imprint Elementree) are the experimental psyche-rocking trio that are quite un-matched by any other band around currently. Often compared to Pink Floyd, Jane’s Addiction and Zeppelin, Anyone combine metal and melody in their own unique flamboyant style that is of very accessible nature. A combination of great musicianship, great songwriting and great showmanship is something they have in abandance, whole-heartedly challenging the very concept of one-dimensional creativity that appears to bog down today’s music.
“You have to be honest with yourself,” Story launches his avalanche of words, “and you have to face to what is going on around you. You have to address it fully, square to it, like I do in ‘Whole World’s Insane’; it is said that 3 per cent of the world population is insane (for your info that is 180 million individuals!) but we all behave insane. We wanted to lift the song for a single after the NY tragedy of September 11 and were told by the record company that some 150 songs, some really innocent like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, are banned which meant that we would be included. You have to fight such narrow-mindedness… We take a stand of counter-culture, resisting the norm and keeping our karmas clean.”
Measuring ground
Story is joined by bass player Static and new drummer Ransom, a replacement for the just-departed Nipples, but it is he who monopolizes conversation so that, when the two are offered an opportunity to chair another Q&A session, they jump at it. But, due to the logistics of being an opening act, their Euro-touring with Mark Lanegan/Masters Of Reality twin-header couldn’t provide the whole show they are renown for back home.
“True, this is not the full ‘Anyoneden show’,” Story explains patiently, “because we haven’t got our full lightshow nor the projections, video… But, because of that we play harder because we feel that audience can sense when you are not putting your full weight behind it. There is a sense of different pleasure doing this kind of shows, there is nothing else to distract from music. This time audiences get the first doze of ‘Maximum acid’, that’s what we call our music, and they try to figure out where we are coming from.”
Riz-man is also a film director who’s made some porno-flicks and it was pity that Euro-denizens weren’t allowed a glimpse of. (Visiting their site you can purchase it, if over the age-limit.)
“We feel that European audiences are more sophisticated and open,” Riz continues at speed, “but that’s understandable, this culture’s older and it is more sophisticated culture in a sense that all of the great, art-bands, progressive bands, have come out of here. Whether it is The Beatles, Pink Floyd, early Genesis and Yes, Led Zeppelin, Bowie, Radiohead… Most of the cutting edge band’s I’ve influenced by. It’s great music heritage and I know that being here is unreal for me because it if the measuring ground.”
Giving thrills
There was a real possibility that Story would never make it this far because he decided to drop out of society on the threshold of his teenagehood.
“I needed to stand back and gain a perspective,” Story’s certainly a loquacious lad, “try to observe the big-picture. The more I know, the more I experience, the more I feel like disassociating myself from it all and do not really feel like an American, I don’t feel like an Earthling… I’m a human being that happened to be born in the United States but, aside few socially infused differences, I’m the same as anyone else.”
“At the age of 13 I decided to drop out from society,” continues without apparently pausing for breath-intake, “refusing nationality, education, culture, social values… You’ve heard stories of me living on a boat, fishing for my food and selling it to survive. I’ve refused religion a long time ago and am at a different level of consciousness; the current institutions kill the planet and kill us, spiritually.”
Anyone emerged in 1995 after a highly experimental trio Sylvia (alonside Story members were the future Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins and bassist Juano of Sky Cries Mary) disintegrated. The new band’s first recorded offering was a self-released ‘Live Acid’ (1999), a document of their warehouse-party-turned-acid-binge (they provided the tabs) that also spawned a film ‘Togetherment’. Anyone can be accused of certain ‘hippyism’ of deed and thought.
“Let people call it what they want,” Riz(la) shrugs his slender shoulders, “it is their right and I’m not really bothered how they see us. A Wiseman doesn’t react to one simple thing but to a whole picture. For every disser there are many others who support us.”
‘Anyone’ often sounds meaty but vegetarians, vegans and lactose-intolerant have nothing to worry about because this is a genuine meat-substitute.
SashaS
19-12-2001
Anyone’s album ‘Anyone’ is available now on Roadrunner
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